DRM (Digital Rights Management) is slowly getting out of company executive heads and several stores are successfully selling music that is DRM free. That’s a good thing for the customer who can transfer the songs that he bought to other devices and even burn them on CD if he likes. We are however not at the point where most users would like to be.
A current trend seems to be to include identifying tags into the downloaded music. While that is not a huge problem if you keep a close eye on your music collection you could run into troubles if someone would steal your computer, notebook or mp3 player. Besides that every single song is available on those networks anyway.
It’s a gray area legally in my opinion and I would suggest to everyone to remove the identifying information from those songs.
Rhapsody is storing the Download ID which identifies the user who purchased and downloaded the song in several tags, those tags are: COMM, TXXX, TXXX01, TXXX02, APIC, GEOB.
Every mp3 tag editor can clear the information in these tags but it is also possible to use a small perl script to get rid of the tags. The Reddit user Keck (via Arsgeek) published it on Reddit and everyone can copy and paste the script from his Reddit user page.
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Isn’t there are non perl way to do this?
Well you can basically use any mp3 tagger that you like and remove them manually.
darkkosmos: of course :) I just wanted the fastest way possible of looking for anywhere they might have put personal info, and I write perl all day, so using MP3::Tag was it. I could write the same thing in C, C++, python, lisp, or any other programming language. It’s basically just reading a file and parsing it into it’s parts. I threw those together in about 5 minutes total.
Does anyone know if the Amazon MP3′s have personal info and, if so, how would you remove it?
Good idea! I happen to have some, so I ran http://perlhack.com/mp3_utilities/list_tags.pl.txt on them. Here’s a snippit:
############# COMM #############
$VAR1 = {
‘Language’ => ‘eng’,
‘Description’ => ”,
‘Text’ => ‘Amazon.com Song ID: nnnnnnnn’,
‘encoding’ => 0
};
$VAR2 = ‘Comments’;
Where the ‘nnnnnn’ is the Song ID from Amazon. There is also an APIC (attached picture) as in rhapsody’s mp3′s, but it is probably just the cover art.
Either of these outfits (or anybody else) could also be adding identifying info steganographically, so it’s still on you if you share them :)