Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs

The joy that Apple decided to sell DRM free music on their popular iTunes platform was soon overshadowed by two information that came to light shortly thereafter. The first one was that DRM free songs would cost $0.30 more which can't not really be explained unless the company or rights holders believe that they need to be compensated for an increase in trading and therefore loss in profit. The second 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 most users, some would have at least preferred to receive information about this before making the purchase.
This can be especially troublesome if one or multiple of your files make their way on to the Internet, either by accident, hacks, or stolen devices. Imagine having your iPod stolen that contains your DRM free music collection, only to find out days later that the thief uploaded part or all of the music to the Internet.
I did find a great way to remove the 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 General > Import Settings from the page.
- Change the setting "Import Using" to AAC Encoder if that is not automatically selected.
- Select Custom for Setting
- Now select 256 Kbps Stereo Bitrate from the menu
Select a song (or songs), right-click it (them) and choose Create AAC version. 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 select Get Info).
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?