At long last, the holy grail has been achieved. PlayFair is the tool to remove the DRM from your iTunes Music Store purchases.
I am a bit late to report this, because I had problems getting it to work.
It turns out that the code in playfair that attempts to locate your iPod is a bit buggy. You can help it out by setting an environment variable IPOD to the path to your ipod (yes, you currently must have an ipod, and it must be mounted and have copies of all the songs you wish to decrypt).
If you're using BASH as your shell, export IPOD=/Volumes/blah_blah
If you're using tcsh as your shell, setenv IPOD /Volumes/blah_blah
(where blah_blah is the name of your iPod. You may have to quote this path or escape spaces and special characters).
Then simply use playfair as directed: "playfair m4pfile m4afile".
Note that theoretically there is no need for playfair to require an iPod. Some sort of keying data is kept in "/Users/Shared/SC Info". Perhaps someone will fix playfair to use this source instead of the iPod.
When I tried it, it worked with m4ps that were not on my iPod, and without setting the environment variable. However, it didn't want the "m4afile" parameter to have an extension. I was using v.2.
Dodgy, but useful. Without it, I would've spent $0.00 at the iTMS. With it, I have thus far spent $9.99. So there you go, anti-circumvention devices increase legitimate sales.
Posted by: Jeremiah Blatz at April 6, 2004 12:51 PMI've been hacking around trying to get Playfair to work without an iPod.
The same file PlayFair uses on the iPod is present on your hard disk - at /Users/Shared/SC\ Info/SC\ Info.sidb . But it's encrypted with different stuff. On Windows, they use some fixed strings and some registry entries. On the iPod they use the iPod identification info. But I don't know what they use on the mac. We need to figure that out.
I tried using the string that System Profiler gives back as my serial number, but that didn't work.
Interestingly enough, I can't rendezvous-share any of the playfair output files. I get a greay "!" dot whenever I try (but at least it doesn't crash). Copying the files over and playing them works just fine, though.
There must be some other meta data left behind after PlayFair strips the DRM.
Looks like SourceForge took the project down.
It's been offshored.
http://playfair.sarovar.org/
As I mentioned before, I have one last difficulty - playfair decoded files do not play over rendezvous.
I've compared a decoded file to a file that was ripped with iTunes from a CD with mp4dump. Here are the differences:
The playfair file has a 'free' and two 'mdat' sections before the moov. The ripped file has a 'free' and 'mdat' at the end.
Inside the moov section, the playfair file has an 'iods' section. The ripped file has no such section.
Inside moov>trak>tkhd, the playfair file has flags = 1, the ripped track has flags = 7
Nothing else appears to be significantly different.
Anybody know anything about these differences?
playfair doesn't seem to be at http://playfair.sarovar.org/
does anyone know where it is now?
Apple sent a cease and desist notice to Sarovar last week and they pulled the project. There was a release sometime yesterday stating that PlayFair will "be back soon."
In the interim, you may be able to find it using a P2P program, but I haven't had any luck, so I don't know.
playfair is still available for d/l, at least as of 12noonGMT7May04. Just Google for precisely
"playfair-0.5.0.dmg"
With this build, there is an issue on some machines where on second or subsequent use, conversion attempts give an error "could not get drm key of user." Plugging in the iPod again will not solve the problem. The workaround is to delete the playfair-created directory ~/.drms and start again with a fresh reading from your iPod. Despite assertions to the contrary, playfair-generated .m4a files will play in iTunes 4.5.
addendum to post "dcwatts at May 7, 2004 11:38 AM"
Of course, this all assumes that you have not already updated your iTunes music library with the new iteration of iTunes. As far as I know, playfair for the new drm encoding is not yet posted (anyone know otherwise?).
Posted by: dcwatts at May 7, 2004 11:45 AM> As far as I know, playfair for the new drm encoding is not
> yet posted (anyone know otherwise?)
iTunes 4.5 changed the LAN sharing protocol but not the iTMS DRM, so playfair'd songs (should) work fine with 4.5.
Posted by: anonymous coward at May 7, 2004 09:36 PMSorry, anonymous coward, the ambiguity was my fault. Yes, I have learned for myself that playfair'd songs play well with iTunes 4.5. However it was my understanding that the app (up through v0.5) could not convert .m4p files after one's library was updated to iTunes 4.5.
Perhaps I misunderstand (that'd be nice).
I'm pretty sure it has to do with the iPod firmware version, not the iTunes version. This is because playfair (all versions) gets its key from the iPod's filesystem.
Of course, Apple is trying to get you to "upgrade" your iPod too. One other thing worth noting is that when you do a successful decrypt with playfair the key that was used gets cached in ~/.drms/. In at least early versions of playfair (I looked at 0.2) if there is a cached key, that's used rather than fetching it from the iPod again. Implication, save those keys and you'll be able to decrypt even after updating your iPod. It does appear that later versions of playfair (0.5) may ignore or overwrite the cached key every time, though I haven't played with it long enough to be sure, and I'm not sure where to pick up the 0.5 source from which would be my preferred way to check.
Also, if you make sure you have a copy of an older iPod software updater you can always temporarily downgrade your iPod when you want to use it with playfair.
Summary,
- If your iPod has firmware older than the latest-and-greatest you're OK
- If you've saved the key that got dropped in ~/.drms you should be OK
I got the most recent version of Playfair to work like a charm, although I haven't tried over Rendezvous yet. The only reason I've wanted it is because I'm behind a firewall at work and want to listen to music that I've legally purchased!
Anyway, I downloaded an audiobook from iTMS and low and behold the file extension for that is .m4b! Playfair didn't know what was up with that one and couldn't strip the DRM. Do you suppose this is some compromise with Audible that they use a different type of encryption?
Posted by: silverback at May 13, 2004 06:49 AMI was using playfair 0.5 and compared the tag data shown in iTunes and the BitRate changed (lower in PlayFair) and the volume db also changed. Anyone know why? I thought it just dropped some info.
Posted by: Eric L at May 30, 2004 03:13 PMHere's what I typed into the command prompt:
playfair -x .mp3 "01 I Fought the Law.m4p" "C:\Shared"
(Tried enclosing .mp3 in brackets and quotes. The .m4p file was in the directory of playfair.exe. Tried having no file extension, and having .txt extension.)
Here's what it said to do:
playfair [-x ext] <infile1> <destdir>
(Ext being the extension of the new file)
Every time, the program didn't say a word, which technically means it had no errors, or at least successfully ran the program. However, I checked in the "Shared" directory, and there were no new files. Is this not the "holy grail", or is my very limited experience with DOS preventing me from seeing a command line error? Or is it just for Apple, I don't know (found it in a zip file).
I am using v0.5 btw. LOL, I read the comments on the original post, about developing a way to convert m4p files. So many people said "Just burn a CD", it amazes how people skip over details. If they hadn't, they would've realized a) no one cared about burning it to a CD and b) it had already been mentioned several times!
Posted by: Curt at June 16, 2004 11:28 PMCheck out the latest version at:
http://hymn-project.org/
I'm using a pc, but I thought my problem with m4p file conversion might sound familiar to mac users as well & that I might find some help here.
I'm new to iTunes & just tried to burn some mp4 files to cd. After creating the playlist, I stupidly followed the iTUnes Help directions & chose "burn to data CD," rather than "Burn to audio cd" or "Burn to mp3." So I succeeded in burnng the files to an audio cd, but they're in m4p format. Is there any way to listen to these copied files on anything but iTUnes or to convert them?
I then tried to go back to the original files in iTUnes & then tried again to copy them to a new audio CD. This time the error msg. said "None of the items in this playlist can be burned." What happened in the interim after I copied them the first time? I don't believe that iTUnes prevents you fr. burning the same song more than one time does it???
Pls. give me some suggestions or better yet directions on how to extricate myself fr. this stupid situation. If you reply here, would you be so kind as to also e mail yr suggestion or fix so I can be sure of reading it promptly. This problem is bugging the hell out of me.
Also, is Playfair mac-only software or will it work in Windows?
Posted by: Richard Silverstein at August 14, 2004 09:44 PM