Anonymizing iTunes Plus Downloads

When iTunes came out with DRM-free music downloads, we all celebrated (maybe I was the only one at the party…). Although there were methods of removing the iTunes DRM from files, the methods were cumbersome and annoying. With the advent of iTunes Plus and its DRM-free downloads, the “protection” provided by DRM was no longer an issue. But just because the files are now DRM-free, does not mean that they lack personally identifiable information. Indeed, iTunes embeds such data into any song you download from the iTunes store. To see some of this data open up iTunes and right-click on a song you have bought from the iTunes store. Select “Get Info” and under the Summary tab, there should be a “Purchased By” and an “Account Name” field, containing your name and email address respectively.

If you don’t want to read this boring article, you may wish to jump to the solution– how to anonymize your iTunes purchased songs.

Why Would I Want to Anonymize My iTunes Purchased Songs?

This post is about removing personally identifiable information from iTunes downloads, but first, it is worth discussing some reasons why one might wish to remove such data. From the Privatunes homepage (don’t use Privatunes to anonymize your iTunes downloads– I discuss why below), I quote:

5 reasons to erase private information from my legally acquired iTunes Plus library:

1. Am I still a child who needs his pencilcase and schoolbag tagged with my name?
2. I bought the damn tune, but someday I may want to sell it (hey, how is it more stupid that selling old CDs ?).
3. I just have a thing for privacy. Is it dirty?
4. How the heck do I know it’s not gonna be shared on P2P networks by my 6 year old step sister???
5. I thought good customer-seller relationship ment something like… how do they say, “trust’ ?

But let’s not dance around the issue– I’m willing to bet that for many of you, anonymimzing your iTunes purchased files is important because you wish to share them without fear of the shared files getting traced back to you. I will put a disclaimer here: I cannot guarantee the efficacy of the methods for anonymizing iTunes purchased music that I will describe in this article. I have great confidence in their effectiveness, but I am making no guarantees.

You’ve been warned.

How Not to Solve the Problem…

Now, where were we? Some of this personally identifiable information may be removable using an ID3 tag editor. You can also remove some of this information by opening up the song inside a text editor, performing a text search for “insert your name here” or “insert your email address here” and deleting the offending strings. Both of these methods remove some personally identifiable information, but not all of it.

According to an EFF article, there are other places where iTunes embeds encrypted account data in the song file.

In searching for a way to strip my iTunes downloads of this information, I ran into a lot of bad solutions. Many suggested burning the track to an audio CD and ripping the CD to my computer. While it is true that this would remove any personally identifiable information from the track (as well as any other information, such as artist, song name, etc), this method also degrades audio quality, which is definitely not desirable. iTunes downloads are lossy files. The audio data is compressed using the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) compression scheme, and put into an .m4a container. Thus, the files are small in size, but this comes at the expense of removing some audio data. This results in files that have a lower audio quality than CD-quality music. I don’t claim to be able to have ears good enough to tell the difference between a compressed and uncompressed song; however, needlessly degrading my song’s audio quality does not exactly sit well with me. When you rip the song from the CD, you are once again putting the file through a lossy compression format when it turns into a .m4a or .mp3 file on your computer. Thus, your ripped song will be of lesser audio quality than the original that you downloaded. Admittedly, you could rip the CD into a lossless format, like .wav or AIFF, but then we’d have a gigantic file size, which is also not desirable (especially if you have an iPod of low storage capacity!).

Remember, any time you convert an audio file from one lossy format to another, you will have some audio quality degradation. Transcoding means converting a file from one encoding method (i.e. file format) to another. For more information on this topic, see the Hydrogen Audio wiki.

What else do misguided people suggest as possible remedies to this problem? There is a program called Privatunes that claims to scrub all of this personally identifiable information from your downloaded songs. If you go to their website and try to download it, you get directed to a page that does not seem to contain any Privatunes download! Weird. But it’s probably for the best, as the EFF pointed out that Privatunes fails to remove all personally identifiable information from files.

The Solution: iTMS Scrubber

I finally found a solution in which I have great confidence over at the what.cd forums. Most of you unfortunately won’t be able to view what.cd, because it is a private torrent site– you need an invitation to become a member.

A what.cd community member, momonyo, wrote a program called iTMS Scrubber that strips your purchased music of all personally identifiable information. It’s incredibly easy to use– simply place any file(s) you wish to scrub in the iTMS Scrubber directory, and double click on the program. Bam. You’re done. You can download version 2.3a for Windows here. You can download version 1.1a for Mac here. At the time of writing, these were the most current versions available.

If you are a what.cd member, here is momonyo’s iTMS Scrubber thread.

When running this program, I would suggest creating a backup copy of your files before attempting to scrub them. There is always a chance that the program could accidentally corrupt your files, so this is simply a good idea.

I hope this article was helpful for you!

In case you were wondering, I added rel=”nofollow” attributes to all links to the Privatunes website in this article. Thus, their flawed program should not see as much of a search ranking boost as it otherwise may have from my article (not to say that my article is likely to have any effect at all but…)