The Never-Ending Battle Against iTunes DRM: NoteBurner and the Tale of Requiem

Ah, the never-ending saga of iTunes DRM… It’s a story that has captured the hearts and frustrations of many. But fear not, dear reader, for I am here to shed light on this ongoing battle and introduce you to two notable players in the fight: NoteBurner and the legendary Requiem.

First things first, let’s get one thing straight: iTunes DRM (Digital Rights Management) is like a locked door, preventing you from freely enjoying your purchased music and videos on any device you choose. It’s a frustrating restriction that has plagued users for years, causing many to seek ways to break free from its chains.

Enter NoteBurner, a tool that promises to liberate your iTunes media. With NoteBurner, you can finally say goodbye to those annoying DRM limitations and enjoy your tracks on any device, at any time. It’s like having a magical key that unlocks the door to your own music collection.

But wait, there’s more to this story. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane and reminisce about Requiem. Requiem, oh Requiem, the unsung hero of DRM removal. It was a software that emerged in the early 2000s, providing a glimmer of hope for the oppressed iTunes users. With Requiem, you could strip away the DRM shackles, reclaiming your right to truly own the media you purchased.

Unfortunately, the battle between iTunes and Requiem raged on for years. Every time iTunes released an update with stronger DRM protection, Requiem fought back, evolving to overcome the new obstacles. It was a cat-and-mouse game, with Requiem striving to keep up with the ever-changing tactics of its opponent.

Alas, the story of Requiem did not have a fairytale ending. The relentless updates from iTunes eventually rendered Requiem powerless, leaving users desperate for a new hero to emerge.

And so, NoteBurner stepped onto the scene. With its sleek interface and powerful features, it’s like a knight in shining armor, ready to battle iTunes DRM once and for all. But will it succeed where Requiem failed? Only time will tell.

So, dear reader, the iTunes DRM removal saga continues. It’s a tale of resilience, determination, and the pursuit of freedom. NoteBurner and Requiem are just two players in this ever-evolving game, fighting to liberate your music and videos from the clutches of DRM. In the end, it’s a battle we all hope to win – the battle for true ownership of our media.

I was recently introduced to NoteBurner by Dave Hamilton, a writer for The Mac Observer. NoteBurner is an app that claims to remove the DRM protections from movies and TV shows purchased from the iTunes Store. The topic of ethical and consumer rights analysis surrounding software like NoteBurner is important, and I was intrigued to evaluate its claims.

For those who are unfamiliar, DRM is code added to digital files that limits when and how those files can be played. In the case of videos purchased from the iTunes Store, DRM restricts playback to specific devices and applications. If you try to play these files on any other device or app, you’ll encounter errors.

A few years ago, some utilities emerged claiming to defeat Apple’s DRM. Bypassing DRM, especially for commercial purposes, is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States, so these utilities were often published anonymously and hosted on servers outside of the country.

One popular utility was Requiem. What set Requiem apart was its promise to remove iTunes DRM losslessly, without any loss of quality. Other apps in this category captured the video playing in iTunes and re-encoded it into a new, DRM-free file. While this method worked for most users, it fell short of the lossless quality many desired and took a considerable amount of time.

On the other hand, Requiem accessed a user’s iTunes authorization keys and removed the DRM from the original file itself. This resulted in a DRM-free file identical in quality to the original, and the process was quick. However, Apple constantly updated the way authorization keys were stored, making it difficult for Requiem to keep up.

Unfortunately, Requiem lost its battle with Apple in late 2012 with the release of iTunes 11. Apple’s new DRM enforcement method proved too difficult to circumvent, leading the Requiem developers to retire.

Since then, iTunes users have had limited options to remove Apple’s DRM, mostly relying on the “screen capture” method. Some users have continued to use the old iTunes version with Requiem, but this is not ideal and is vulnerable to Apple’s restrictions.

NoteBurner’s claim of “lossless” DRM removal is intriguing because it supports the latest version of iTunes. It seems like a viable alternative to Requiem.

To see what NoteBurner is capable of, I purchased NoteBurner M4V Converter Plus for Mac and downloaded my DRM-protected iTunes purchases. With my MacBook Pro in hand, I set sail to test the app in international waters.

After engaging in a series of intense monkey knife fights and hastily recounting the Buffalo Bills preseason game to my wife, much to the chagrin of the National Football League, I got right down to the task at hand and introduced NoteBurner. This application is refreshingly uncomplicated and offers a modest array of choices. It kindly advises you to shut down iTunes if it happens to be open, and then grants you the ability to effortlessly import your DRM-protected iTunes videos. This can be achieved by either drag-and-drop functionality onto the NoteBurner interface, or by perusing a convenient list within the application itself.

So, here I was, unsure about what NoteBurner was all about. The app gives you the choice to convert the DRM-free file into different device formats, which obviously means there will be some loss of quality. But then, there are also options that allow you to keep the original source formatting. This made me think that NoteBurner might actually be able to perform a lossless conversion, just like Requiem.

When I decided to convert a file, I chose the “same as source” option and clicked “Convert.” To my surprise, iTunes popped up, started playing the file through AirPlay, and quickly disappeared. Then, the NoteBurner interface took over and showed a progress bar for the video conversion. I checked my Activity Monitor and noticed that both iTunes (running in the background) and NoteBurner were using a lot of CPU power. This, along with the amount of time it took for NoteBurner to finish the DRM removal process, indicated that the app was definitely re-encoding the iTunes output, rather than using a lossless decryption method like Requiem.

Based on what I could gather without deeper access to the app, it seems that NoteBurner creates a virtual AirPlay device, instructs iTunes to play the DRM-protected file on that device, captures the output, and then re-encodes it into a DRM-free MP4 format. All of this happens behind the scenes and isn’t shown to the user. The app also plays the file at an accelerated rate, as fast as your Mac can re-encode it, so you don’t have to wait in real time for the conversion to finish.

Once the DRM removal was complete, I had a new copy of my purchase sitting on my Desktop, free of any restrictions and playable on any device or app. However, I now knew that this process wasn’t lossless, so I wanted to see if there was any noticeable difference in quality.

To compare a truly lossless DRM-free file with what NoteBurner had produced, I used an old version of iTunes on a Windows partition to remove the DRM from the same file using Requiem. Here’s what I discovered.

Requiem, as I already knew from my previous experience, produced a file that wasn’t exactly identical to the source. But I wanted to measure the difference in a way that would reveal just how much deviation to expect. A file doesn’t have to be technically lossless to be practically lossless (meaning it can still look the same to the viewer), but I needed some data to conduct this subjective analysis.

First, I compared the file sizes of the original iTunes file and the ones generated by Requiem and NoteBurner. Unsurprisingly, the original file and the one produced by Requiem were identical, which makes sense given the way Requiem removes the DRM.

So, I tried converting the file with NoteBurner, but it turned out that the converted file wasn’t the same size as the original. This just adds to my suspicion that NoteBurner’s claim of a “lossless” conversion may not be true.

But hey, size isn’t everything, right? I mean, there’s only a 1 percent difference in file size between the NoteBurner and Requiem files. I decided to dig deeper and look at the picture and audio quality as well.

Audio

In NoteBurner, you have the option to include just one audio track when converting a file. However, by default, the app includes both tracks that are usually present in an iTunes video file: a stereo AAC track and a 5.1 surround sound AC3 track. Both tracks were there and playable in the NoteBurner file, but I wondered if there might have been some lossy conversion happening.

Now, I’m not an expert in audio, so I may not be able to hear the difference anyway. But here’s what I found: the AAC track in the Requiem file was 110MB with an average bit rate of 152kbps, while in the NoteBurner file it was only 89.2MB with 123kbps. As for the AC3 file, it looked the same in both files with the usual 384kbps 6-channel track.

So, it’s clear that at least the AAC file has some loss in quality, but most users probably won’t even notice.

Video

And here’s where the real difference between NoteBurner and the original file (or the one converted by Requiem) shows up. The NoteBurner file doesn’t look bad per se, and it’s probably good enough for those who have already accepted the quality limitations of low bit rate iTunes files. However, it’s very obvious that this is not a “lossless” DRM-free copy by any stretch of the imagination.

When I watched the NoteBurner file, I immediately noticed macroblocking and other compression artifacts that were absent in the Requiem and original iTunes files. These artifacts were mostly found in dark areas of the scenes. I’ve included a few side-by-side examples here (Note: it’s best to view these comparisons at full-size by clicking on them).

When I work with a source file from iTunes that is already heavily compressed, I don’t expect the image quality to be perfect. However, it’s clear to me that the NoteBurner files make the image even worse.

So here’s the thing – when it comes to videos, sometimes the picture quality just isn’t as clear as we’d like it to be. You might notice that the finer details seem to disappear or become a bit blurry. That’s because the video has been compressed at a lower bit rate or with reduced quality settings. So basically, when you try to re-encode a video that’s already been heavily compressed, it’s pretty hard to avoid this blurring effect if you want to keep the file size reasonable.

Okay, so here’s the deal: you might not notice these issues right away unless you’re comparing both files side-by-side or you’re really into video quality. But trust me, the quality difference varies depending on the content. A romantic comedy processed by NoteBurner is probably fine to watch, but something like a dark and visually impressive sci-fi film would suffer in that lower quality state.

Let’s Talk Conversion Time

Now, this might not matter to you if running an old version of iTunes isn’t an option, or if the method used by Requiem is removed in the future, but it’s worth comparing how long it takes each of these apps to remove the iTunes DRM.

So, here’s the thing: Requiem doesn’t really “convert” anything. It just goes through the original iTunes file bit by bit and removes the DRM. On the other hand, NoteBurner actually does a conversion by re-encoding the raw output of the iTunes file into a new DRM-free MP4. That means the NoteBurner process takes longer, and boy, does it!

I tested both apps using the same roughly 3.7GB iTunes source movie. Requiem took 4 minutes and 12 seconds to produce its DRM-free copy, while NoteBurner took a whopping 17 minutes and 43 seconds to do the same job.

Now, keep in mind that NoteBurner is re-encoding the video, so your Mac or PC’s speed can also come into play. The times I just mentioned were based on a 2014 MacBook Pro. To see if a more powerful computer could speed things up, I ran the test on a 2013 Mac Pro. That one took 15 minutes and 4 seconds. So, the speed of your computer matters, but it doesn’t increase proportionately with the power of the CPU. So, it’s not a massive improvement.

Time to Wrap Up

NoteBurner might be fine for many users, but it’s definitely not the “lossless” solution it claims to be. Still, if you really want to free your purchased iTunes content from the constraints of DRM, it may be your best, if not practically only, option.

Requiem was really something because it gave users exact copies of their original iTunes files. Of course, those original files weren’t perfect due to the compression required for digital distribution, but at least the DRM removal process didn’t make things worse. Not like NoteBurner, which captures and re-encodes the content. So, it’s almost impossible for Apple to block NoteBurner completely, like they did with Requiem. NoteBurner may need some minor updates to work with future changes in iTunes and OS X, but as long as Apple lets you see the content on the screen, apps like NoteBurner will keep on working.

And now, onto a final point: responsibility. Using these apps, or at least the process of using them, might be illegal in your country or where you live. And regardless of legality, using them is definitely a violation of Apple’s terms and conditions that you agreed to when you started using the iTunes Store.

I could go on and on about the morality of using this type of software, and discuss the difference between the “spirit” and “letter” of the law. But the truth is, these apps are available to pretty much every iTunes user out there, and whether you use them or not is all up to you.

But here’s the thing: what you do with those DRM-free files is what really matters. If you’re using these apps to make content that you’ve legally bought from iTunes playable on your own devices, that’s one thing. In my opinion, that falls within the ethical and practical realm of Fair Use in the United States. But if you use these apps to create DRM-free files and then start sharing them on BitTorrent, Usenet, or anywhere else, that’s a whole different story. No amount of lecturing from me will stop someone who’s determined to take that second path, but here’s an observation: This is why we can’t have nice things!