iTunes songs will now be sold without DRM...

All questions answered here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/138000/2009/01/drm_faq.html?lsrc=rss_main

Good news for B&O and Beomedia, Beosound 4 and future Beosound 5 owners...

p. 

AFAIK, this is only scheduled for April 2009.

For the us in the US 8 out of the 10 million songs are available right away. The rest to follow by end of Q1. I checked the German apple site, it provides the same info as the US site so I would think the picture internationally is similar.

As they have been elsewhere (i.e. Amazon etc.) for some while (not to mention cheaper).

Yes... as iTunes was one of the last with DRM... we can safely say that DRM are now dead. At least for Audio.

Also iTunes has a much bigger market share (75%) than any other store.

Tom:

AFAIK, this is only scheduled for April 2009.

No, many tracks are already DRM-free, beginning Tuesday. I have already upgraded many of mine. The process of converting all the millions of tracks will be complete by April.

a2bur:

Will all the songs I've got from Itunes have to be downloaded again to clear the protection , and is there a way to see if my past purchased songs are protection free ?

Richard

Yes you need to redownload your songs to het them without DRM, but is only cost you 30 cent by song.

The new files are also twice the quality as the old files.

Go to the itunes store, on the right, you'll find a link/menu called iTunes plus. Go there and it will tell you all the songs you have that can be upgraded and you can update all of them at once.

Go to this URL to find more...

http://www.macworld.com/article/138000/2009/01/drm_faq.html?lsrc=rss_main

look at this while you are it

AAC is not a proprietary format at all, and the BM5/BS5 can perfectly read AAC...

See the answer to the story you've posted.

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/19646/

 

 

 

I am not sure why I would want to convert an iTunes 256kps DRM free AAC file to MP3, especially if there is a loss of quality?

PhilLondon:

AAC is not a proprietary format at all, and the BM5/BS5 can perfectly read AAC...

See the answer to the story you've posted.

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/19646/

good call phil! might as well -delete- my previous post ;-) but as mentioned in the second article, older device may use this...