Shanti’s Dispatches

Ever purchased the same song off iTunes multiple times, simply because you happened to have downloaded it on another computer?

Does this drive you freaking nuts? Enter hymn project.

While hymn has been around a while, it seems that it has gotten stable over the past several years.

In early versions, Apple and hymn were playing a game of cat and mouse; each successive version of iTunes would break hymn’s decryption mechanism.

A week or two later, hymn would come out with a new version that defeated Apple’s new scheme. It seems hymn has won the arms race, for now. I just decrypted my entire purchased library from iTunes (you know, songs I already owned but were laced with crippleware).

M4A/M4P Encryption Guide

When you download songs off iTunes, they come in the encrypted flavor of the AAC Format. (AAC is like the successor to MP3)

Hymn will convert your .m4p files (maintaining 100% audio quality) into .m4a files. You can then play these .m4a files into any program that supports AAC. (hymn also offers an option to convert to mp3)

M4A - UNencrypted (*.m4a)
M4P - ENcrypted (*.m4p)

To play unencrypted m4a songs in Winamp, for example, just download this plugin and place it in your Winamp plugins folder.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos