Others online have been testing this new release and have found a couple of interesting points;

* No PDF support in books – Other popular ebook devices do have native PDF support and synchronization including the Amazon Kindle and the B&N Nook. Converting from PDF to ePub format does seem to work however.

* Audiobooks are now considered “books” – It seems that after the iTunes 9.1 update is installed your existing audiobooks are moved into the books category and audiobooks has been removed from the list altogether.

“Simply compare the iTunes Music Store and the Amazon MP3 Store”

This helpful little script will locate any song or album you’re currently viewing in the iTunes Music Store and display it for purchase on Amazon. Since iTunes launched their variable pricing on most of their catalog, saving $$$ will be a bit more difficult than before (since Amazon was alway cheaper and DRM free). Advantageous is a simple script that take a bit of the leg work out of the price matching process by locating and displaying your current audio conquest. This script is available for both Mac OS X and more recent Windows OS’.

Up until Apple released version 6.0 of iTunes an anonymous coder by the name of FutureProof had developed a great Java based application called JHYMN (Java Hear Your Music aNywhere). JHymn provides an easy to use GUI with much added functionality including multiple was of scrubbing your iTunes purchases of Apple’s FairPlay DRM. Apple is no longer allowing iTunes versions other than 7.x to purchase music (or otherwise) from the iTunes Store but if you have (or can find) a copy of the iTunes 5.x installer you could install it onto another computer on your network and use this system to scrub your DRM music. This will NOT work if you have previously installed iTunes version 6 or higher on the same computer.

Now on to the newer but less direct approaches to the DRM issue.

Seidai Software has developed a piece of Mac OS X only software called FairGame that will convert songs you bought on the iTunes Store to an unprotected format (using iTunes default encoder) and keep all the original metadata, lyrics and artwork. They say that a 4 minute song will take around 2 and a half minutes to convert to a fully scrubbed AAC file on a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz notebook. This is one of the best solutions since JHYMN was a viable solution… that is until Apple released a “fix” for many of the new iTunes 7.01 problems. Once version 7.02 was released FairGame no longer worked.

So you’ve read up on the previous two methods but you have already upgraded to iTunes version 7.02 and you still need to rid your precious music library of that filthy FairPlay (ya right) DRM! Well if you’re a long time iTunes user you may have noticed that there is a somewhat “legal” method to removing your DRM’d music by simply burning a CD of that music and then re-importing that CD back into your iTunes library. Yes, I can hear you saying “That will take forEVER! and a day to scrub my ultimate iTunes library!” I completely agree with you on this point and that is why I use BurningThumb’s DRM Dumpster application. This Mac OS X application is built of the premise that you can indeed just burn you MP3’s to a CD followed by reimporting your music back into iTunes. Nothing too new here except DRM Dumpster DRM Dumpster is able to erase and reuse a single CD-RW disc to handle your entire MP3 library without you having to babysit and pop discs in and out of your optical drive. How sweet is that and this process will work with any version of iTunes you are currently running under Mac OS X.

I hope this post helps someone out there figure out what the best method for DRM removal is for their particular situation. Please feel free to drop comments as well

*UPDATE 1/20/2007 *
Many people have been asking about a Windows solution for stripping iTunes DRM and so I have done a bit of research and found that the JHYMN peeps have a project called MyFairTunes6 which may due just that. This project is still in it’s infancy but should be working with only a few bug left. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you!

The iTunes Music Store has posted the following statement as well:

I hope that every customer, artist and music company executive takes a moment today to reflect on what we’ve achieved together during the past three years,

With iTunes 7, switching between different music libraries became much, much easier:

• Hold down Option (or Alt in Windows) while launching iTunes.
• Select or Create your desired iTunes libraries from the dialog box.
• You can choose from either your local hard drive, an external device, or even a network drive.

Remember that each time you launch iTunes it will automatically select the library that was last open. If you choose to use a network drive and you are not on that network at the time you will need to hold down the Option (Alt in Windows) key when opening you iTunes library to select a different library at that time.

One Mac OS X Hints user developed a script to switch between two aliased drives to accomplish this task. Even better solutions are presented in the thread below.