Special iTunes tags

[garym]

I'm looking at the 'view tags' in iPeng.

I am not concerned with the functonality of the files in LMS. I am more concerned with the fact that I have paid for something which is suppoed to be my property now but which still seems to be governed by somebody else.

Depending on what country you are in (e.g., the United States), you have only purchased the right (i.e., a license) to use the track, not resell it, give it to others, etc. So you may not have purchased what you think you purchased. Even if you buy the CD itself, if you rip it and then sell or give away the physical CD, the current law would expect you to delete your digital copy as well to be in compliance.

[aubuti]

In the sense that I did not pay money in order to acquire music which contains proprietary information which can neither be read nor edited by the common tag editors.

If the speculation that JJZolx reports is accurate (it seems quite plausible to me), then it sounds like standard tracking that Apple has been doing since they removed DRM. You bought that music under certain restrictions (all listed in the 98 page license agreement), and these tags provide info related to enforcement of that agreement. Whenever you buy a CD or an online track it is still "governed by someone else", e.g., copyright law.

In any event, if you want to pursue this then the right place would be the iTunes Store. What do they have to say about it?

[foxx]

No offence, guys - but allow me the question: Are you on the payroll of apple?

May I request that we return to the technical side of this issue? My question reamains, how do I edit those tags?

[aubuti]

On the payroll of Apple? Hardly. And why do you ask? Because people had the termerity to point out that what you thought you were buying may not be the same as what you actually bought?

As I don't have any such iTunes Store files to experiment on, nor any AAC (presumably these are AAC) I can't give you many details. Here are a couple brute force options:

- use a hex editor to replace the metadata with blanks (or rubbish)

- do what people used to do to get around DRM: burn the tracks to a CD, and then rip that CD. If you care about not degrading audio quality, rip it to a lossless format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless, so you don't get a double-dose of lossy encoding (the original file and then the ripped CD).

[garym]

No offence, guys - but allow me the question: Are you on the payroll of apple?

huh? Yeah, that's why I use dbpa, mp3tag, foobar2000, and Squeezebox stuff for my music. ;-)

edit: but independent of who I work for, I do have passing knowledge of the legal rights of purchasers of the rights to use intangible property such as music files, movies, books, games, etc. (whether on physical media or not).

[JJZolx]

A good place to pose the question would be the Hydrogen Audio forums. There may be an Mp4 tagger that can edit or remove the fields, or, worse comes to worst, you'll have to remove the whole tag and retag the files from scratch. I'm thinking possibly a command-line tool.

When they ask why you need to remove the fields (and the inevitable followup question, why it bothers you so bloody much), play dumb, because I honestly doubt that there's anyone else with your rather odd viewpoint.

[garym]

A good place to pose the question would be the Hydrogen Audio forums. There may be an Mp4 tagger that can edit or remove the fields, or, worse comes to worst, you'll have to remove the whole tag and retag the files from scratch. I'm thinking possibly a command-line tool.

When they ask why you need to remove the fields (and the inevitable followup question, why it bothers you so bloody much), play dumb, because I honestly doubt that there's anyone else with your rather odd viewpoint.

I'd start by asking in one of these two forums:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...p?showforum=54

[Mnyb]

Ok .

http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/25/how...-itunes-songs/

Fyi PuddleTag in Linux can see the apID and the purchase date in it's extended tags and something called XID so , so if using PuddleTag some of these can be removed easilly .

This post has a good example on what can be in these files .

http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=15256

This is an example in fact one of my only examples I have purchased only one iTunes album to test my new iPad a while back I normally don't .

[Mnyb]

I've a very usefull app for viewing stuff in Media files http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en

In text or htm mode it gives for the same file :

[Mnyb]

And copyrigth is thorny .

Afaiu The file is your property but not the content , content can be used as agreed in the eula.

Wonder how iTunes react to files purchased by someone else I can suddenly see the application for the tools I linked before .

I can see a somewhat more valid aplication as sharing the files within a family with different accounts .

Anyone tried ? I don't use iTunes for music so I won't know , i rather not if a hexeditor is needed