freeing up itunes songs (removing fairplay DRM)

I unfortunately have some songs I bought from the itunes music store using the FairPlay DRM. I know, I know, that was a mistake. well now I’m stuck with about 55 songs I can’t play in linux, and I have to worry about making sure I don’t run out of the 5 auths for my macs (which is a much more serious and likely scenario)

some songs can be ‘upgraded’ for 30 cents to a non-drm version (and a higher sampling rate too). follow this link on your mac:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/iTunesPlusPage

for me, only 1 out of those 55 songs was available for upgrade though.

so now I’m going to have to go through by hand, burn them all out to CDs as cd audio, then re-rip them, then add back in the metadata (artist, song title, my rating, etc). and accept the loss in quality from being encoded twice. blech.

needless to say I won’t be buying any more of the tracks with DRM on them.

P.S., there used to be programs (QTFairUse was one of them) that would allow you to strip the DRM off the songs. but then Apple sent the guys who wrote it and distributed it some Cease and Desist orders, so now that’s not available any more.