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
Related posts:
Erase Personal Information from iTunes Plus SongsDRM Free Songs come to iTunes
Apple iTunes Songs Cleanup
Share Songs with Mojo and iTunes
How To Anonymize iTunes Songs
Create Free Ringtones In iTunes
Get Free iPhone Ringtones from iTunes
Autorate songs in iTunes (Mac and Windows)
8 Responses to “Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs”
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[...] Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs – gHacks.com [...]
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[...] to gHacks the personal information can be removed by converting the file to another format. Not the best way [...]
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[...] Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs (tags: drm itunes mp3 aac) [...]
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[...] might not be that likely but I can definitely understand the concern of some users. I already described a way to get rid of the information by converting the songs directly in [...]
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[...] (iTunes Plus) provides DRM-free music, and as it turns out even those files are laced with your personal information, allowing Apple to trace a file back to you if it ends up on a P2P site. All the rest of the files [...]
I agree with the previous comment. Converting from a lossy encoding to another lossy encoding will degrade the sound quality. Why not just edit the existing file?
Also iTunes encoders suck!
Here’s how to clear your personal information from an iTunes Plus m4a file:
First, you’ll need to clear the Apple ID field (usually just your email address) and purchase date (which is different from the iTunes “Date Added” field)
- Download AtomicParsley [http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/] and unzip it.
- Open a Terminal window (it’s in Applications/Utilities)
- Drag the AtomicParsley application’s icon into the Terminal window. Do not hit enter.
- Drag the m4a file into the Terminal window. Do not hit enter.
- Enter the following command. Note that the dashes before “manualAtomRemove” are double dashes, even though they may not be displayed as such here because of HTML encoding.
–manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.apID” –manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.purd” -W
- Hit Enter
Now, you still need to remove your name:
- Install HexFiend [http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/]
- Open the file in HexFiend
- Find your name
- Replace those characters with the exact same number of periods.
- Save the file
Hey does it also works if i convert it to mp3? :)
Will all of my personal info be removed? :) Or should it be to aac?
I like mp3. hehe.