Apple's Digital Rights Management
The truth about Apple's FairPlay DRM
We'll take you through step by step and show you how to liberate your downloaded iTunes music files from Apple's pesky FairPlay DRM in another guide for beginners: How to remove FairPlay. Fair Play is Apple's own Digital Rights Management technology. First, however, let's examine exactly what FairPlay does and why you should care to remove it. FairPlay is encoded into music files you buy from the iTunes Music Store and is used by the iPod. The purpose is to prevent playing back the music files on unauthorized computers and devices.
FairPlay inhibits your music in the following ways:
- A FairPlay encoded track can be copied to any iPod
- FairPlay encoding allows the track to be played back on up to five authorized computers
- The MP3 encoded with FairPlay will allow you to copy the track into PCM format and burned to a CDR, which strips it of the DRM
- PCM or Pulse Code Modulation is the format that is played back in conventional CD players
- FairPlay prevents you from using encoded music files on an operating system for which no version of iTunes exists, such as Linux
It seems simple: just convert the track to PCM and strip it of the DRM. However, because the resulting music file was derived from a lossy compression method (which means it's not as good quality as a conventional CD track), converting back to MP3 will introduce even more lossy compression to the audio file, thereby degrading the sound even further. It's just not an option.
Recent testing shows DRM sucks battery life from your MP3 player
Testing performed by Cnet recently demonstrated that Apple's DRM FairPlay causes an additional 8% loss of battery power. This means the number of hours your iPod is rated to playback music will be at least 8% less when playing back music encoded with DRM. The reason for the extra loss in power is due to the extra processing power required from your MP3 player to decode the DRM on top of the music file. Other forms of DRM are even worse. Other popular online subscription music services that use Microsoft's DRM PlaysForSure have been found to add up to 25% drain to your battery's life. Battery life is critical to your iPod since the iPod has a built in non-removable battery. Apple rates your iPod battery to last two years or 500 charge cycles.