Digital Rights Management. Which sounds cool until you realize it's their "right" to not let you listen to your song that they are "managing". The song is encrypted, and iTunes has a secret key to decrypt the song if it feels you are worthy.
Sometimes you can get rid of DRM by decrypting it and leaving it as - same exact sound quality, but you can now freely listen to or copy the song.
Sometimes you can't do that, but you can do something almost as good - let iTunes decrypt and convert the song to an uncompressed sound file (audio CD format), and then compress that back into something an iPod can play (mp3). The trouble with that is that decompressing and recompressing a file loses a bit of data, so the sound quality won't be quite as good (though possibly not noticeably worse).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 12:56 am (UTC)Sometimes you can get rid of DRM by decrypting it and leaving it as - same exact sound quality, but you can now freely listen to or copy the song.
Sometimes you can't do that, but you can do something almost as good - let iTunes decrypt and convert the song to an uncompressed sound file (audio CD format), and then compress that back into something an iPod can play (mp3). The trouble with that is that decompressing and recompressing a file loses a bit of data, so the sound quality won't be quite as good (though possibly not noticeably worse).