How to play purchased music on other systems…

[bkbroil]

Engadget has published a step by step guide on how to play your iTunes purchased music on any of your devices. WooHoo! Cool!
The songs you purchased are DRM protected, that means you can only listen to them on specific computers and devices. For most folks the limits of a few computers or devices are fine, but for the gadget geek- nope, we have too many computers and devices.
Now to be clear, this isn’t a way to take music you bought and give it to someone else, this is so you can listen to your own purchased music on other systems or devices. In fact, your personal info is still in the file. The application we’re going to talk about is called hymm, and here is the description from the site:
The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.
How it works
hymm decodes the songs you have purchased using the key from your iPod and/or your operating system and make a new file which is not protected, it keeps the cover art and song data as part of the file. Since this is using your key, you can only do this for your songs, which I personally think is fair- they’re the songs you bought, you should be able to put them on your other computers or devices.
The application works on a Mac or PC and the source code is also available from the hymm site.
Do you think this violates DRM or not?

[noolly]

Nope 'cos your personal information is still with the file.

[jkendrick]

A more round about route and unquestionably legal is to burn the iTunes to CD and reimport them into WMEDIA or anything else. The DRM is lost in the process and it's the only way to backup your iTunes music collection.
I'm gonna give hymn a try right away as I have hundreds of iTunes songs I wish I could play on something other than the iPod.

[jkendrick]

After a quick look at the hymn web site it doesn't appear to convert to MP3 so I'll have to find a tool to convert them from AAC to MP3.
Apple will just do what they did when FairPlay comes out and will change the DRM again. It will be hidden in a program update like the most recent one. The main purpose of that update was to change the DRM and break Fairplay and other utilities already out. It also broke the utilities that let you stream iTunes music anywhere on your network.