Identify "protected" tracks?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I’ve got a collection of music that has been managed in iTunes. I’m wanting to move away from iTunes and use Picard/MusicBrainz to re-organise it and tidy it up. Some of the files were bought from the iTunes store back when they applied DRM. The problem I’ve got is that nothing apart from iTunes can play them of course! These are *.m4p audio files, and iTunes shows them as “Protected AAC audio file”.

I thought I might get an error while trying to write the new metadata - that would at least highlight it, but I don’t - I guess the metadata isn’t protected, just the music part of the file.

Any thoughts on how I can identify these in Picard? Do I need a plugin? (I’m not averse to a bit of coding myself, if anyone can point me in the right direction)

2

Are you sure that VLC can’t play your *.m4p?

You could try to convert this *.m4p with FFMPEG and something like:
ffmpeg -i *.m4p *.mp3
or
ffmpeg -i inputfile.m4p -f flac outputfile.flac
or any other output format you like.

3

Thanks for the pointer to ffmpeg - wow, it has a lot of options!!! I’m sure there’ll be something in there that can help… :slightly_smiling_face: