iTunes “album only” tracks are now DRM-protected

[Arthur]

This isn't good.

 

Source: livven.me

 

I recently noticed, while re-downloading some of my past purchases on iTunes, that a few tracks showed up as DRM-protected .m4p files, which was odd since iTunes had dropped DRM for music back in 2009. Plus I remembered that when I originally downloaded the files sometime last year, they indeed were all DRM-free .m4a files.

 

After buying some new albums a couple days ago and again ending up with an .m4p, I investigated a bit and found that these DRM-protected files all had one thing in common: they were marked as "album only" tracks in the iTunes store, which means that you can’t buy them separately without buying the whole album. All other tracks are unaffected and still DRM-free, however.

 

This change seems to have occurred fairly recently, and without any news coverage or announcement from Apple. All reports that I could find in forums (Algoriddim, Logitech, Apple, Serato) and on Twitter are from the last few weeks.

[penfold_99]

It's probably come about due to the upcoming change in the law over fair copyright.

 

It probably let you only copy the whole album to another device instead of individual albumn only tracks.

[Arthur]

It turns out the tracks aren't DRM protected after all.

 

Update. You can simply rename the .m4p extension to .m4a and the file will play fine. There appears to be no DRM at all. I have no idea why Apple would do this since many apps and devices don’t recognize the .m4p extension, which only leads to unnecessary confusion (and posts like this), but whatever.

[sted]

It turns out the tracks aren't DRM protected after all.

 

I suspect its to sucker you into buying an idevice that just works rather than using a real device