In a dilimma with my music. Help please?

[Shadowprice]

Alright, so I've been a Mac user for about the past three years, pure Mac 100% with no bootcamp or running Windows. Dumb I know, but at the time I enjoyed them. Recently I've switched back to Windows because I've gotten back into gaming and I was tired of having an overpriced machine with inferior specs, I miss building my desktops and overclocking them.. anyways.

I've had a pretty good music collection going for the past 10 years, but when I bought my Mac I switched to iTunes as my main media player. Over the past three years, I slowly added to my library by purchasing music off the iTunes store. I would get a lot of gift cards from work and from friends for holidays and what not, so I used them. On top of that, I bought some music as well. Of course owning a Mac and a iPhone this wasn't a problem at all, but recently I've switched back to Windows and I want to get rid of iTunes completely.. even more incentive that I no longer have a iPhone and I have a Android phone now that won't play DRM protected files.

That's the problem, iTunes DRM.

Quite a few of my songs and albums that I've purchased are DRM'd and I don't know what to do. Is there a way to remove it or have any windows players that will play these files, better yet, get them somehow to play on my Android? Thankfully, my whole collection doesn't have DRM, but a decent chuck of some of my favorite tracks do. Is there anything I can do or am I stuck with iTunes?

 

[Bahamut]

You have one or two legitimate option and one that's not quite so legit:

1) Burn off the songs to CDs or even to a "virtual CD burner" which might be able to create ISOs of the files (that are ISO files of audio CDs, basically) and then turn those into files you can play that are free of DRM (mp3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, etc). Only serious downside to this method is that you'll be transcoding from lossy to lossy formats so signal degradation is going to happen. Whether or not you'll notice it is up for grabs.

2) Play the songs with iTunes and capture the audio stream in real-time using some audio capture software like Audacity, etc. Obviously this is a far less efficient solution and would require hands on for each song, and you probably have quite a few so...

The not so legit option is potentially stripping the DRM from the purchased files and that's not something that can be really discussed or explained here at this forum. What I will say is Google "fair use itunes" and you'll get some links to places with the info you'll need and discussions about the tools required.

The final option would be just to re-acquire the tunes again somehow in a non-DRM laden format...