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kpw_1 Author

Level 1

11 points

Some recent M4A purchases seem to be protected

I've recently purchased a couple of albums through iTunes (i.e. in December 2019), and a few of the songs on those albums are protected so I cannot copy the files to another computer and use them with a music player that is not iTunes. I use Clementine as my the player on my music server which doesn't have the horsepower to run iTunes effectively, but the affected files are useless on my music server since the files are protected.

All song files, both the normal unprotected ones and the few protected ones, have file extention M4A so none of them should be protected. In fact, I didn't think Apple was using protected files any more. But for some reason, these files are protected and are unusable outside of iTunes.

Is there any reason why this might be happening, and is there some way to "un-protect" these files?

Posted on Jan 3, 2020 3:06 PM

Top-ranking reply

kpw_1 Author

Level 1

11 points

Posted on Jan 5, 2020 6:42 AM

Just an update on my original post. I've been able to fix my issue by removing the impacted songs from my iTunes library and re-downloading them. The second download resulted in properly unprotected song files being loaded into my music library. I'm not sure why the original downloads for those files ended up being protected; perhaps the files were just corrupted in a subtle way that resulted in protected behaviour - not sure that makes sense, but who knows?

In any case, I've found a fix for the situation so I'll just need to remember that trick if I run into it again.

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Some recent M4A purchases seem to be protected

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