How to remove DRM from iTunes purchases : Part II

This post concludes the discussion on how to remove DRM from iTunes purchases.  We outline some solutions to common problems.

Erasing CD-RW

In Part I, we explained how to remove DRM from an entire album of songs.  However, many people have multiple albums to convert.  Here's how to erase the CD-RW for re-use:

• Open Finder Utilities (In Finder, Go > Utilities).
• Select "Disk Utility.app":

• Double-click to open:

• Under "SuperDrive", select the CD that is in the drive.
• Click the "Erase" tab and then the "Erase" button:

• Make sure it is not your hard drive!
• When prompted, confirm you wish to erase the CD
• Wait for Disk Utility to erase the CD.

Yay!  Now you have a blank CD-RW in the drive.  Restart the process to remove DRM from each protected album in your library.

Multi-Disc Albums
The above technique works great for single-disc albums.  However, when you have an album which spans multiple discs, it may cause confusion for iTunes.  Specifically, when you burn the tracks and try to re-import them, iTunes will not offer to "Replace Existing" tracks.  Instead, it will simply import them alongside the protected ones, resulting in duplicate tracks.


Here is a technique to remove DRM from multi-disc albums and correctly "Replace Existing" tracks.  Consider this album, which spans two discs:

Make two separate playlists, one for each album.  Although not required, you may give them each a slightly different name so that they are easier to remember:

Burn the first playlist to a CD as you normally would.  When it is done, click on the CD and select all the tracks, like this:

Now open the file info for the selection (File > Get Info). Notice the "Disc Number" field is empty:

We just burned the first CD of two, so enter those values for the "Disc Number" field:

(The boxes will check automatically.)  Click "OK" to accept the changes.

  

Yay!  Now when you re-import the first disc, it will offer to "Replace Existing" songs.  Erase the CD and repeat the steps for the second playlist.  This time however, remember it is the second disc of two.

Partial Albums

Sometimes it is the case that you only bought a handful of tracks from an album.  In other words, you did not buy the entire album from iTunes.  Consider this example, where I bought only tracks 2 and 12:

If you were to follow the steps from Part I and burn just these tracks, the resulting CD would only contain two tracks, numbered 1 and 2.  If you proceeded to import the CD, iTunes will again not offer to "Replace Existing" tracks because the track numbers don't match.  This would result in duplicate songs with incorrect track information.

Fortunately, there is a workaound.  First, go ahead and create a playlist as you normally would:

Then, fill in the gaps by dragging in some songs from another (complete) album:

Now go ahead and burn the CD as you normally would.  However, when iTunes is done, do not import the entire album.  Rather, hand-select only those songs that were originally protected:

Drag the selection over to your Music library and drop them in.  iTunes will recognize the tracks and offer to "Replace Existing" ones as you'd expect.  (The other songs on the CD will be skipped.)

Yay!  Now you can remove DRM from partial albums as well.  With all these techniques, I was able to remove DRM from over 400 songs in about a week.