Any updates about purchasing music from iTunes?

Just wondered if anyone has updated information about purchasing music from iTunes.

The iTunes service just rolled out in the UK and they state you can create MP3 CD's (as well as burn unlimited audio CD's)

Is the service of any use to Karma owners?

If you can get mp3s out of it (which I didn't think they did) then, yeah. You should be able to use those with the Karma.

It might be arbitrarily difficult, though. They might force you to burn a CD in order to get the mp3s, and then you'd have to copy 'em back off. Or they might not. But if they claim that iTunes can provide you with mp3s that can be used in an mp3 CD player, then you can use those same mp3s with the Karma.

Are you referring specifically to iTunes support in the Karma? (You posted this in the Karma forum.)

If that's what you mean, it's the same story. Apple's copy protection scheme is still proprietary, so you can't play iTunes files directly in the Karma.

You can convert iTunes files into less-restrictive formats as you always have been able to do:

- Use hacking tools to remove the DRM from the files and transcode.

- Use an audio driver shim such as Total Recorder to grab playback audio and encode that.

- Burn to an audio CD and rip that.

Thanks Tony

Yes, I have a Karma (as well as a Rio Mk2a). And I know the Karma doesn't contain support for iTunes. So I'm just looking for anyone who's had recent sucess or failure in purchasing music on-line from Apple and transferring to the Karma

Can you point us to a web page where it talks about supporting mp3 CDs?

Edit: No, wait. I found it:

You can play your music CDs in your car and on home stereo systems. iTunes also lets you make MP3 CDs, though iPod makes them a little less useful. Audio CDs play in CD players like the one in your car or home stereo. MP3 CDs play on Mac and Windows computers and in MP3-compatible car stereos and CD players.

Chances are that they're just talking about a feature of iTunes, not the iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Music Store only provides encrypted AAC files and the only way to get those onto the Karma is to reencode them, which will lead to losing quality.

There is an application that will remove the encrypion from the AAC files to make them plain AAC (which is MPEG-4 audio), but the Karma doesn't support that format, either. In fact, probably the only portable player that does is the iPod. But getting AAC support on the Karma could happen much more readily than also getting encryption support on the Karma. I doubt either will happen, though. Maybe the empeg guys want to chime in on this one.

Ok. Just did some tests with iTunes 4.6 on my Powerbook:

My purchased music burned fine when iTunes was set to "Audio CD".
When set to "MP3 CD", it gave an error of "None of the items in the playlist can be burned to disc."
When set to "Data CD", it created a CD full of folders for Artist and Album, then inside sat my .m4p Fairplay version 1 and 2 protected AAC music files.

There is a tool out now called Hymn that can strip the DRM off the files, but leave the user id information on who bought the track. It's not clear if that is enough to avoid the DMCA, but Apple is still trying to fight it by changing iTunes. 4.6 does not play files decrypted using Hymn, until a patch is applied to Hymn.

Elliminating the DRM leaves the big hurdle. To play the file, you need a system capable of playing an MPEG 4 Audio file (AAC). Thus far, the iPod is the only portable to do this with a hard drive, and a handful of flash files.

However, if you do want to listen to your music with no degration from reencoding it to MP3, you could decrypt the song and transcode it to FLAC for the Karma.

This is excellent information. Thanks!!