How to Remove Copy Protection from iTunes Songs Purchased Before 2010

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The Apple Music Store has been open since the end of April 2003. Currently, the iTunes Store manages a catalog of more than 26 million songs around the world. The company has managed to sell 25,000 million songs worldwide, according to statistics dating from February this year. At first, the audio files for sale were protected with a DRM (Digital Rights Management) anti-copy system . This implied several limitations, such as that the protected songs could not be played on other computers than the one in the buyer's iTunes account . It took Apple six years to remove those restrictions, and in April 2009 all songs on the iTunes Music Storethey were DRM free .

However, those people who bought them in their day still have songs with an anti-copy system in their library . Basically all purchases made between April 2003 and April 2009. There is a method to remove DRM protection from those old songs. To do this, you must be in the iTunes account with the Apple identifier used for the original purchase. Second, you have to enter the menu and select Preferences . Then you click on the Store tab . Then you have to make sure that the option to Show iTunes purchases in the cloud is activated, and Preferences is closed. Next you need to check that the protected songs are available for download. Click on the cloud icon within the music list view. All titles that have an icon with an arrow pointing down to their right are ready for download.

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Before downloading the new themes, it is a good idea to remove the DRM-protected versions . Simply locate the songs within the iTunes list view, sorting them by type. All protected audio files are selected and the Delete songs button is pressed. Then it is time to press the cloud icon again to download the unprotected versions of the songs that have just been deleted by clicking on the icon with the downward-pointing arrow that appears to the right of each song title. And that's it. The new versions can be played on as many computers as you like, and on any kind of portable reader.

Songs previously purchased between April 2003 and April 2009 may no longer be available on the iTunes Store . It may also happen that the buyer has changed the Apple identifier from one country to another, which will prevent downloads of titles purchased in other countries. In those cases, when there are no new DRM-free versions of the purchased songs , there is no choice but to convert them manually. For this, there are several programs on the market that eliminate copy protection, such as DRM Converter (whose basic version costs $ 20) or DRM Buster ($ 50), among others.