The iron fist of DRM

Apple released iTunes 4.5 today. It's full of awesome new features (the printing features by themselves are enough to jizz over), but unfortunately, it also comes with a new version of the FairPlay DRM system, which makes sure you don't do things with your music you're not supposed to.

Apple has closed both the analog and the digital holes in the DRM system. Until today, there were three ways to "liberate" your music from copyright restrictions (enforced by DRM):

1. Burn your purchased music to a CD, then re-rip the music to MP3 or AAC.
2. Use a sound editing program such as Amadeus II or Sound Studio to import your purchased music (using QuickTime), then export the song as AIFF.
3. Use the very naughty program PlayFair to hack into the DRM keys on your computer, decrypt the songs, and write a new, perfect AAC copy with no DRM.

Today, options 2 and 3 are no longer available. You can still re-rip your music, but it's undesirable due to the digital->analog->digital conversion. I suspect using Audio Hijack Pro to capture iTunes' output (before it hits the sound hardware) is just as dirty of a process.

Looks like everybody is kinda stuck until the anonymous author of PlayFair writes a new version!