Ryan Egan.com

While I enjoy using and purchasing music from iTunes, Apple’s file protection is poorly implemented and inconvenient for the average downloader. This tutorial will outline the steps necessary to remove Apple’s iTunes FairPlay DRM protection from downloaded songs. Please be aware, circumventing FairPlay and decrypting your protected music files is currently illegal under the DMCA. I do not advocate that anyone attempt to do this… This tutorial is provided as a "proof of concept" only.

While there are several options available for cracking FairPlay, this tutorial will focus on using QTFairUse6. It’s small, efficient and will decrypt your music without any degradation in sound quality.

For the first step, you must download and unzip QTFairUse6. The most up-to-date version (v2.5) can be found on the hymn forums, or to download it directly, click here (5.1M). Once downloaded, you will need to extract the files from the .zip archive in a folder of your choosing.

While many people claim that QTFairUse6 v2.5 works with the most current version of iTunes (7.0.2.16), I received numerous errors from QTFairUse6 when I attempted to decrypt my files. An easy way of avoiding this would be to download an older version. I recommend downloading iTunes 7.0.1 which can be found on filehippo.com. Or to download it directly click here (35M). If your version of iTunes is older 7.0.2, you may skip the next few steps.

In order to fully downgrade your version of iTunes, you must completely uninstall your current version and reboot your computer. Uninstalling leaves the iTunes database intact so all your settings will migrate over to the older version. It will also not delete any of your music files, or playlists.

Once your computer has rebooted, launch the installer (you just downloaded) for iTunes 7.0.1. Proceed through the steps to complete the installation.

When setup is complete you can begin using QTFairUse6. Return to the directory you specified when unzipping in step 1 and launch the "QTFairUse6" executable. Use of the console version of QTFairUse6 is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Although the default set of options in QTFairUse6 are desirable for most people, for the sake of simplicity I would recommend selecting the "Process just these files" option. With this selected, you can choose which files you wish to decrypt by dragging and dropping them from explorer. iTunes protected files are easily identifiable by their .m4p extension

Once successfully added, QTFairUse will update and your list of files to be decrypted will appear in the main window.

In case decrypting should fail or you want to keep your original protected .m4p files, you should specify a folder to be used for backups.

Once you have selected a backup folder, click "Start conversion" and watch the magic happen.

Depending on iTunes, you may need to sign into your iTunes account using your Apple ID and password. This is necessary so that iTunes can authorize your computer to play your files.

If everything goes smoothly, the "success" message should appear in the QTFairUse window indicating that the decryption is complete.

As an added bonus, the newly decrypted files are automatically updated in your iTunes library so that you don’t need to worry about adding them back in. You should be able to open iTunes and play your files as usual without the need to update anything. The decrypted files can now be transported to other computers without iTunes or played on any other .mp3 player which supports the AAC codec.