DRM-Free Music from iTunes

DRM-Free Music from iTunes. Great! Two questions:

  • Can I currently buy them while running Linux?
  • Can I play them using only free software?

I’m fairly sure the answer to the former is still no. But I might well boot into Windows (I still have the copy of XP which came with my PC), install iTunes and buy some tracks just to give Apple and EMI a pat on the back, if I knew there was a free implementation of AAC or whatever it is to play them with. Is there?

19 thoughts on “DRM-Free Music from iTunes

  1. You can certainly play AAC files in Ubuntu, provided that you install the right package. AAC is roughly as ‘free’ as MP3 is – not as free as Ogg Vorbis but more free than Windows Media or QuickTime. If that makes sense.

  2. AAC is part of the MPEG4 standard, so it’s not exactly proprietary.

    You do still need to run iTunes to buy the songs though. I personally don’t mind that, but I only use Linux on servers.

  3. CodeWeavers had iTunes support for some time. But I don’t know whether they still support the newest version, iTunes does some really strange stuff.

    “Can I currently buy them[…]?” Currently? As far as I know the new offers won’t be available before Mai. I’ll have a look at the offerings then and will buy some nice unencumbered music.

  4. If freedom is not important to you, my understanding is that you can install iTunes on a GNU/Linux machine. I believe I read that in an Ubuntu Hacks book. I think you had to buy a proprietary package like Crossover or something like that. Never done it though so you’re on your own if you wish to try.

    My understanding is that AAC codecs cannot be distributed as binaries so again, if freedom is a concern, then AAC is not a format one would want to support.

    Overall though, the news about DRM-free music is a good step in the right direction. It bothers me somewhat though, that this perception is being built that we should pay for freedom. That is, the price hike for DRM-free music as compared to DRM-laden music. Perhaps this is a pragmatic and wise concession in the long run, but to those who have fought DRM for the past few years for the sake of freedom, it can feel uncomfortable to win by having to pay for freedom. The DRM-laden music should not be distributed at all…not distributed for a lower price.

  5. You won’t need to do that: EMI will allow its online services partners to sell their songs in any unprotected format, including MP3. So presumably some service(s) will do that, and you can forget about AAC all together.

    Paul

  6. Even though I’m not on linux, I hate having to use iTunes to buy songs. Why can’t they just have everything on a website like everyone else? It really sucks.

    Then when I finally do load iTunes to have a look around, everything is extremely sloooooooow.

  7. As Paul mentioned I am as well waiting for the mp3s to come. Since the hardest part has already happened (hell finally froze) I am sure it’s just a matter of time other provider will jump in even offering FLAC and ogg versions.

    eMusic seems like the most natural provider for the MP3s after they update their systems from a semi-subscription basis to individual downloads or something similar.

    I can’t be happy enough for yesterday’s news. I still believe it’s a steal to charge $1.29 per track considering you must substract some production and distribution costs and markups. Even more considering you can buy full CDs at BMG Music Club for about $5 a piece including S&H with their best offer. I’ve heard about artists not getting paid for music club sales but I can’t believe that. Not that label can’t be that greed but artists so ….

  8. Yeah, I’m hoping for Ogg’s personally. The Allofmp3 model really rules, and I hope we’ll end up with the legit music sites having, if not online encoding, then at least a good selection of options for the picky and choosy :)

    How about mp3 v4 (~140 kbps) for those who don’t care about quality, 128 and 256 kbps ogg vorbis and aac and finally flac for those who don’t believe in psycho acoustic models. :)

    Now don’t ask me how I know a term like that. Boy I hang too much at hydrogenaudio.org.

  9. mr: I joined emusic for a while; they didn’t have very much stuff I liked. Either that, or their browsing interface sucked. And they don’t supply oggs – which means I had to fire up an external player to listen to every nastily-truncated 30-second sample.

    The rest of you raise a good question: who’s going to be first to offer OGGs of EMI’s music? Perhaps I should wait a couple of weeks and then become their customer. All my music currently is Ogg, and my portable player supports it well.

  10. There is a Banshee plugin to buy stuff from the iTunes Music store. Pretty plain.. just gives you a search bar and list of results. It’s under unmaintained on the Banshee plugins page, so it may no longer work with the current version of Banshee, but it’s a starting point.

  11. eMusic has a new XULRunner based download manager: http://developer.emusic.com/

    However, I think it still uses an external player for listening to samples and it wouldn’t run on my Debian testing system.

    I doubt eMusic will start selling EMI tracks now. They say that they are 100% focused on independent artists and plan to stay that way.

    I find quite a lot of stuff on eMusic that I like. I guess it depends on what you kind of stuff you listen to. I also find that it is good for discovering new stuff since individual tracks are so cheap, the risk is lower.

    Recently I’ve been working on a script that uses your last.fm profile to find stuff on eMusic to download.

  12. Peter Rock wrote:
    It bothers me somewhat though, that this perception is being built that we should pay for freedom. That is, the price hike for DRM-free music as compared to DRM-laden music. Perhaps this is a pragmatic and wise concession in the long run, but to those who have fought DRM for the past few years for the sake of freedom, it can feel uncomfortable to win by having to pay for freedom. The DRM-laden music should not be distributed at all…not distributed for a lower price.

    ————-

    I don’t see why that should be a problem. I can either pay 79p for a licence to play the music on one computer and iPod, or I can pay 99p for a licence to have that music anywhere I want it. Would you be complaining if they had started selling DRMed tracks for 59p and non-DRM tracks at 79p, or do you just not want to pay more?

    10 years ago I had to make a trip to a shop and pay �13-15 for a CD album and had no chance the listen to most of it first. In may, I’ll be able to instantly get an album with the same freedoms of a CD album, the chance to preview it first, a more convenient format/form factor, and all for �7.99 – bargain if you ask me (although I’d prefer to pay $9.99…)

  13. I support eMusic just on the principle of wanting to eliminate DRM from music, though it is getting harder after a year to find music I like. I’m on a reduced plan at the moment (20 downloads a month) and still stretching to find stuff to keep me around.

    I’ll definitely be buying some of the new tracks on iTunes from EMI come May, to encourage the other labels to come around (and free the tracks I’ve already purchased). AAC is a better format that MP3 IMO but from a “FOSS” it is roughly equivalent. I don’t know for sure why Ogg isn’t picking up yet, but I really would like to see it take off more. I would think someone like Apple would be happy being free of the licensing fees, but I guess they would still have to pay the licenses to support the other formats, so maybe they haven’t justified the extra engineering to support Ogg as well?

    Oh, and I support Ian’s argument – this is first of all a smart compromise to make, second they are also doubling the sampling rate / quality of the tracks, and third the rate increase isn’t really about the DRM, they’ve been trying to get a price hike anyways (and I don’t necessarily think that it is unrealistic for them as a business to push for). Yes, I’d prefer if the price wasn’t going up and they just offered the “freed” tracks in place of the DRM’ed ones. Keep in mind also that this is a last-ditch effort by the music industry to keep album sales up for a bit longer – the albums are all drm-free and are the same price as before, so the premium is on individual tracks. Basically EMI is saying “this is the price we need to switch from an album-model of the world and support the new (old) single model”.