Until a decade ago I was one of those blind Apple users that was using iTunes as the only way to organize my music.
Now I’ve liberated my collection using navidrome and/or direct syncing the whole library via syncthing.
Today I noticed that I have about 20 m4p files that can’t be played with anything. Seems like one day I was drunk and I purchased an album on iTunes, so I guess it’s DRM.
There’s a way to convert those files to something with more freedom?
I don’t have iTunes but in some box in my garage I have a 15 years old iMac with some ancient os version that can’t be updated because Apple’s marketing team said I should buy a newer one
Just re-download in a better bitrate and format.
The correct answer
Would any of these help? Otherwise like someone else said, music is one of the easiest things to find on the high seas.
No, tried a bunch and they either fail or create a file with noise
I believe that VLC should be able to convert this for you. If not then maybe try Audiocity.
VLC shows the right length, but then plays 3 seconds of garbage audio and stops
It might just be easier to find a copy on the high seas than dealing with the DRM.
some obscure true crime series are only on itunes so not always possible
Looks like, I tried three m4p converters online and they all failed
Maybe it’s just going to be faster to search those 20 songs on soulseek
NoteBurner should work. You need 10.12.6 Sierra and iTunes 12.6.1.25. I know those versions of MacOS and iTunes work for removing DRM from video files, I’d expect audio files to work as well.
So it seems like if you burn the files to a cd with itunes and re-rip the cd (ideally with something like exact audio copy) you can get a drm free version. There might be a way you could write it to an iso with a virtual cd drive with virtual burning capabilities, which it seems like the ‘ultra’ version of daemon tools has. Not sure on a free option, other than pirating daemon tools. There probably is a free alternative though.
That sounds like an insane amount of trouble to go through, so unless you want to do all of that for the experience, just redownload drm-free files with soulseek or something.