Converting songs bought in iTunes to something more useful

If you’ve ever bought anything from the iTunes store, you’ll know that it comes down in Apple’s proprietary and drm-ed-out-of-the-wazoo AAC format. This isn’t a problem if you have an iPod, nano, mini, shuffle or ROKR. But what do you do if you have something like a Creative Zen player (Or in my case a Motorola A1000)? How can you convert protected AAC music to something more usable like MP3, OGG, WMA or FLAC ? You could burn the songs to CD from iTunes, then rip them back but here’s a better way that least doesn’t involve wasting CDs.

In order to do this, you will need the following:

• Hymn
• dbPowerAmp
• The dbPowerAmp m4a codec

Copy the .m4p files you want to convert into a directory and open a new dos window in that directory. Then type

hymn file.m4p

This will then create file.m4a which is an unprotected file. This still contains information identifying you, so don’t go sharing the file. Apple places what are called ‘atoms’ in the file to uniquely identify you.

You can then right click on these and hit convert to convert them. If you want to batch convert all of the m4p files on your system, then you can simply do

dir \*.m4p /S /B > m4p.txt
for /f %a in (m4p.txt) do hymn %a

Then convert at your leisure with dbpoweramp. Please note, hymn only works on iTunes protected songs that you’ve bought, and as mentioned earlier, don’t share any files you create.