MAXIMUMPC
CHALLENGEANOTHERing with environmental racket. That not only makes your listening
experience more enjoyable, but can also prevent hearing loss.
Despite what Apple charges for a set of its replacement buds,
the earphones that come with 90 percent of the digital media
players on the market are throwaway items—they’re only in the
box so you’ll have something to listen with when you bring the
player home. Do yourself a huge favor and dump ’em. Spending
a few bucks more for something that sounds better, feels better,
and will last longer just makes sense; after all, you only get one
set of ears in life.WHERE’S THE VALUE?
To our subjects’ ears, there wasn’t a tremendous distinction between
the tracks encoded at 128Kb/s and those encoded at 256Kb/s. Despite
the fact that most people identifi ed the higher-quality track, no one
was absolutely certain about their choices with either set of earphones,even after an average of fi ve back-to-back A/B listening tests. That
tells us the value of Apple’s and EMI’s more expensive tracks lies
solely in the fact that they’re free of DRM restrictions.
And as much as we dislike DRM, we just don’t think
DRM-free tracks alone are worth paying an extra 30 cents for.
Interestingly enough, you can buy an entire album encoded at
the higher bitrate for the same price as the album encoded at
the lower bitrate. But if you purchased the lesser-quality album
through iTunes previously and now want to upgrade, you’re
screwed: Apple will charge you 30 percent of the original album
price for the higher bitrate.
In the end, Apple’s move doesn’t change our opinion that the best
way to acquire commercial digital music remains buying CDs: You can
rip and encode them at any bitrate you want, you can transfer them to
any device you want, you won’t have any DRM issues to worry about,
and you won’t have to pay anything extra for them. If Apple wants toIDENTITY TAGS
IN ITUNES
Just because a music track lacks DRM
doesn’t mean you can use it any ol’ way
you chooseApple and EMI are giving online music buyers
what they asked for: songs that can be played
on any device. But the absence of DRM
doesn’t grant us the right to share the music
we’ve purchased with anyone we choose.
That’s piracy, and it’s both illegal and immoral.
Although there is no DRM embedded in
these tracks, there is information that could
be used to trace the song back to you should
you decide to share it—especially if it’s put
on a peer-to-peer network. This is nothing
new—it’s always been in iTunes tracks. To
fi nd it, launch iTunes, right-click any song
you’ve purchased, and select Get Info. Click
the Summary tab and you’ll see information
related to the song (size, bitrate, sample rate,
etc.), the date you purchased it, how many
times you’ve played it, the name of the per-
son who purchased it, and the buyer’s iTunes
account name.
Apple can’t use this information to track
you or what you’re doing, but it can trace
music that you’ve illegally shared back to you.
If you lose your iPod or someone steals it and
uploads the music to a P2P site, the authori-
ties might accuse you of putting it there. We’re
not so paranoid that having our name and
account information embedded in our music
bothers us, but if it bothers you, there are at
least two simple ways to strip it out.
The easiest method is to convert thetracks to MP3 format from within iTunes.
Here’s how: Click the Edit menu and choose
Preferences. From the drop-down menu
labeled “Import Using,” choose “MP3
Encoder” and click OK. Select the unprotect-
ed track or tracks you wish to convert, click
the Advanced menu, and choose “Convert
Selection to MP3.” If you’d like to convert an
entire folder containing unprotected tracks,
hold down the Shift key and choose “Convert
Selection to MP3.” A dialog box will open,
enabling you to choose the folder contain-
ing the music you’d like to convert. Note:
Your original track will remain intact, but this
method won’t work on protected tracks.
The drawback to the fi le-conversion
approach is that transcoding between the
two lossy compression algorithms will likely
result in the loss of some audio quality. A bet-
ter alternative is to manually strip out the data
using the freeware utility Atomic Parsley (aGoogle search will reveal a link). Once you’ve
downloaded and installed the program
(uncompress it in the directory containing
your music), open a command-line window,
navigate to the folder containing the fi les you
wish to alter, and type the following command
(replacing “song title.m4a” with your song’s
name. And be sure to put two hyphens in front
of “manual...”):
Atomicparsley “song title.m4a”
--manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.
ilst.apID”
Atomic Parsley will create a temporary
fi le that doesn’t contain the metadata you
removed. Import this to iTunes to make sure
it plays properly and then back up the original
fi le. When you examine the new track’s meta-
data with iTunes’s Get Info command, you’ll
see it no longer contains your iTunes account
name. Of course, crafty Apple may have also
placed your info in a less-obvious location.5 MAXIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2007
ITunes will encode your personal
name and your iTunes account info
into the metadata of each track you
purchase on the service.If you’re paranoid about having your
iTunes account name in your tracks,
you can easily remove it using the
utility Atomic Parsley.Continued from page 52Continued on page 56Ë