Now I think Apple is doing the right thing by offering DRM-free music. Although, frankly, the DRMed stuff is not all that hard to crack. Just burn it to CD then re-encode it with the Apple Lossless codec. No loss of quality necessary. (I wouldn’t recommend re-encoding to mp3 or AAC unless you don’t care and/or don’t notice the drop in quality.) Hard drive space is cheap, anyway. My 30 GB 5G iPod cost me less than my (sadly, broken) 20 GB 2G iPod. And if you don’t want to waste a CD-R, I’m sure there are other hacks out there for removing the DRM.

All of the sudden, there’s this bugaboo about Apple encoding your user information in the DRM-free AACs you download. Paranoid much?! You know what they say, if you aren’t guilty, you have nothing to hide. Hehe.

But seriously, come on. Ever heard of sed?

sed -i s/Your Name//g gnarls_barkeley-crazy.m4a

Voila! Your name is gone, daddy, gone.

(WARNING: I haven’t actually tried this, and this may completely corrupt your AAC file beyond all redemption. Don’t blame me. You’re the idiot who didn’t make a backup.)