Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs

The joy that Apple decided to sell DRM free music on their popular iTunes plattform was overshadowed by two elements. The first one was that the DRM free songs would cost $0.30 more which could not really be explained. The second element was discovered after users were actually able to purchase drm free songs at iTunes.

Account information, namely name of buyer and account name, remained as information in the DRM free files. While this should not be a problem for everyone some users would have at least preferred to receive information about this before making the purchases.

I did find a great way to remove this information right in iTunes. All that needs to be done is convert the song(s) once which will remove the personal information. Please note that you only have to change the preferences (steps 1-5) once. Start at step 6 if you have changed them before. Here are the details:

Click on Edit > Preferences
Select Advanced > Importing from the menu
Change the setting “Import Using” to AAC Encoder
And select Custom for Setting
Now select 256 Kbps Stereo Bitrate from the menu
Select a song (or songs), right-click it (them) and choose Convert Selection to AAC
A second song should appear after some seconds, right click that song and verify that it contains no personal information at all. (by right-clicking the song and selecting Get Info