Why not just burn your music onto CDs and then re-rip the CDs?

Burning your iTMS (iTunes Music Store) purchases to CDs and then re-ripping those CDs results in either a loss of sound quality, or, if you want to avoid that loss, having to rip your music back as much, much bigger files using formats like WAV, AIFF, or Apple Lossless.

Without diving into too much technical detail, it's important to know that audio formats like AAC and MP3 are forms of lossy compression. The sound you get from an AAC or MP3 file isn't a perfect replica of the original audio signal from which such a file was created. Ideally the results are so close to the original that most listeners either can't hear any differences at all, or if they can, they don't find the changes in sound quality very objectionable.

When you burn an AAC file to CD and then re-rip the CD as AAC or MP3, the sound you end up listening to will have gone through a lossy compression process twice. Those losses can add up, taking what were only mild or even unnoticeable deviations from the original sound after the first phase of compression and making those deviations much more noticeable and objectionable. This is especially true if you try to take music at a low bit rate like 128 kbps (what Apple uses for iTMS) and try to compress back down to the same low bit rate.

If you ever do end up having to burn and re-rip (the day is almost certainly coming when JHymn won't work, at least for a while, because Apple has updated their DRM), I recommend re-ripping your iTMS purchases as at least 192 kbps AAC files, or VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 files with an equivalent or better bit rate, in order to minimize the negative effects of a second generation of lossy compression.

Apart from sound quality issues, burning music to CD and re-ripping is slow, inconvenient, and, unless you're using and re-using the same re-writable CD over and over again, wasteful of CDs.

What is "scrubbing"?

Once JHymn has finished undoing Apple's DRM, the end results are completely proper, standard AAC files, files which ideally should play on any AAC-compatible music player, including Apple's own iTunes and iPod.

The problem is that it's possible to remove DRM but miss removing traces which indicate that a file had once been burdened by DRM. None of these traces of previous DRM should interfere with playback of the file, but Apple's products look for at least some of these possible traces (such as the 'geID' atom) and may refuse to play your unlocked files, or may delete these files from your iPod, if these traces are found.

"Scrubbing", therefore, is the process of tracking down and removing traces of a file's previous life as a DRM-protected file. There are plenty of sneaky ways to hide such information, however, so the scrubbing techniques employed by JHymn will likely have to be improved over time as Apple adds new trace information or uses old trace information that's already there but which we haven't yet discovered.

To "rescrub" files that have been previously unlocked and/or scrubbed — something you might want to do when new versions of JHymn with improved scrubbing are released — activate the .m4a checkbox in JHymn's main window so that JHymn will re-examine your already-unlocked files. Re-examining all of your old files slows JHymn down — JHymn runs much faster when all it has to do is find a few new purchases that you've made — so you'll probably want to leave .m4a unchecked unless you're deliberately trying to rescrub your old files.

There are some extra Preference settings you have to make to make scrubbing more thorough. Please see this part of the main Info and Help page for more details.

Why not convert everything to MP3?

As discussed here, converting your AAC files into MP3 files causes a loss of sound quality. For some people, and for some uses, this issue might not matter. You might not be able to hear any loss of sound quality at all, or, if you do hear a loss, you might not find it very objectionable. Converting to MP3 is also much slower than simply unlocking AAC files and leaving them in the AAC format.

The import thing is to be aware of the trade-offs of converting to MP3. There are advantages to MP3 as well, such as access to a greater variety of music players, burning 8-hour plus CDs that will play in your car's MP3-capable CD player, and an added degree of safety from any DRM "gotcha" games that might arise in the future with scrubbed AAC files which, as it might turn out, weren't scrubbed thoroughly enough.

Is JHymn legal?

First off, let me say that I'm certainly not a lawyer and what I offer below is no more than my own limited opinion of these matters.

Using JHymn certainly runs afoul of your End User License Agreement with Apple — the license where you have to click on the "Agree" button before you can use the iTunes Music Store. The legitimacy of such non-negotiable "click-through" licenses is questionable, however, in many countries and local jurisdictions.

The United States currently has the harshest law I know of — The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — which could be interpreted to make JHymn illegal. Other countries are being pressured to adopt similar laws, for the purported purpose of creating more uniformity in world trade. How far such measures have progressed so far, however, I'm not certain. My sense of things from what I can gather via Google is that, for now at least, most people outside the US should have little to worry about.

Even in the US, there's reason for hope that using JHymn, or any other DRM-breaking tool for reasons of traditional "fair use", will, when the dust settles, be proven to be perfectly legal. (Isn't it amazing that a law with such harsh penalties is so unclear that the legality of a thing has to hover in some Schroedinger's Cat-like indeterminate state for years?) The older US v. Sklyarov case looks bad for JHymn, but then again, the way things are currently going in the Lexmark v. Static Control case bodes well for JHymn, especially when you consider that the main driving force behind the work on this project has been interoperability, a reason for cracking DRM which is allowable (at least in some instances) under the DMCA.

What's FairKeys about? What's all this talk about "keys" anyway?

DRM puts digital "locks" on your music. Not surprisingly, there are digital "keys" which are needed to open those locks. For any given iTMS account many different keys — not just one key — may be needed to unlock all of the various locks used on a collection of purchased music. Apple occasionally changes the locks used on your purchases, meaning that new keys are needed from time to time for opening those new locks. In order for JHymn to unlock your DRM-protected files, JHymn needs all of the keys which match all of the locks on your files.

If iTunes or your iPod can play your protected music files, it stands to reason that you must, in some form or another, already have the keys that you need. You wouldn't be able to hear your music if it wasn't, at least temporarily, unlocked for you. JHymn and the original Hymn before it used to be able to extract your keys from an iPod or, for Windows users, find where those keys were stored on your computer and retrieve them.

In the ongoing cat-and-mouse game of breaking Apple's DRM, however, Apple currently has the upper hand when it comes to hiding the keys it needs to play your music, keys that are already somewhere in your computer or on your iPod. The keys are definitely still there somewhere, but encoded in a way that no one I know of has yet been clever enough to figure out. So how can JHymn get the keys it needs?

This is where FairKeys comes in. FairKeys (both the original program by Jon Lech Johansen and the feature of JHymn named after that program) pretends to be a copy of iTunes running on an imaginary computer, one of the five computers that you're currently allowed to authorize for playing your iTMS purchases. FairKeys logs into Apple's web servers to get your keys the same way iTunes does when it needs to get new keys. At least for now, at this stage of the cat-and-mouse game, FairKeys knows how to request your keys and how to decode the response which contains your keys, and once it has those keys it can store them for immediate or future use by JHymn.

To be blunt about it, I'm not actually thrilled about FairKeys. I'd rather not be relying on connecting to Apple's own servers to get the keys JHymn needs. I personally I'm not very skilled at such things, but I certainly hope someone else figures out how to access the keys already saved on your own computer, or already saved in your iPod, so that FairKeys, for as long as FairKeys even continues to work, is more of a back-up approach to getting your keys rather than the chief and only way to get them.

Why does JHymn want my iTunes password? Seems fishy (phishy?) to me!

FairKeys (explained above) is why JHymn asks you for iTMS account information. JHymn needs your account info in order to log into the iTMS web servers and get your keys. Quite understandably, however, many people are reluctant to give out their account information, especially their passwords, simply because some piece of software they've downloaded from the web asks for them. Given all of the "phishing" going on out there, such suspicions are certainly warranted.

Here's where open source software has an advantage. You personally might not have the technical know-how needed to look at the JHymn source code to make sure that it's handling your account info safely, but even if you can't, other people are looking this code over and would probably be hollering loudly by now if anything suspicious were going on. Further, those with the know-how and the right tools can build the JHymn application from scratch, using the source code, if they have concerns that the pre-built applications available for download aren't what the source code says they should be.

If you're still worried about password privacy you can always run iTunes immediately after using JHymn, go into your account set-up, and change your password.

Why can't I log into the Music Store?

The most frequent problem people have using the FairKeys feature in JHymn is that they can't log into the Music Store. The most common reason is that iTMS is simply too busy to let you log in. The best solution to this problem is simply to try again later. Anyone who has spent much time (and money!) on iTMS realizes that the store gets bogged down at times. You might, for instance, be able to browse the store, but as soon as you try to buy something or add it to your shopping cart... churn... churn... churn... error message.

There are other possible reasons for connection problems, however. You might have blocked JHymn from getting out to the web by using Windows' built-in firewall or with some other security program. If you have an older version of Java installed, you might be reaching the Music Store, but your Java can't validate the security of the connection. This latter problem can be solved in one of two ways: The best way is to install the latest version of Java. The quick-and-dirty solution is to go into JHymn's Preferences and turn on the Naive Trust Manager.

As of JHymn 0.8.4, JHymn allows users to configure HTTP proxy settings. For some users this will be what they need to do in order to get around a firewall and make FairKeys work. You'll have to check with the person in charge of the network you're using to find out if an HTTP proxy is available, and, if so, what the appropriate settings are. Once you have that information, enter it into JHymn's Preferences, in the Optional HTTP Proxy field, using one of these formats:

Format	Example
host:port	127.0.0.1:8118
user@host:port	joe@192.168.1.40:8080
user:password@host:port	bob:secret@aproxyserver.com:80

How often will I need to authorize JHymn?

There's no simple answer to that question. If you aren't deauthorizing any real computers authorized for your iTMS account, or deauthorizing the imaginary computer JHymn authorizes, you might only need to authorize once, and then not again for a long time. The more often you deauthorize computers, the more often Apple issues new keys that you'll need to reauthorize JHymn in order to retrieve.

If you deauthorize JHymn when you're done using it, then go buy more music from iTMS, you'll almost certainly need to authorize JHymn yet again when you go to unlock those new purchases.

When should I deauthorize JHymn?

As you might gather from from the above answer, the best answer is: only when you really need to.

If you're getting rid of an old computer, Apple recommends that you deauthorize that computer via iTunes. When you're doing that, that's also a good time to deauthorize JHymn. If you're technically-minded and can find your GUID and key files and copy them, however, (they're in the invisible directory ~/.drms on the Mac, boot_drive:\Documents and Settings\your_home_directory\Application Data\drms on Windows) you can move those files to your new computer and maintain the same imaginary computer for JHymn's use — meaning no JHymn deauthorization will be necessary.

If you're in the situation where you're fully booked up with authorized computers and have to deauthorize a computer just so that JHymn can squeeze into your five-computer limit, and then deauthorize JHymn so you can reauthorize that computer, then consider this: If you've successfully unlocked all of your protected files, why do you need so many authorized computers? Consider keeping only one or two computers authorized for when you want to buy music, and then distribute your unlocked files to play on the rest of your computers — they won't need to be authorized to play files that have already been unlocked.

What do you mean all of my authorizations are used up?

If you aren't careful about deauthorizing old computers, if you've let friends play your protected music on a college network and haven't made sure they deauthorized their computers when they were done listening, if you've had computers die without a chance to deauthorize them first, or if you've used JHymn or other Hymn Project software on multiple computers without copying your GUID and keys from one computer to another, you can easily end up in a situation where you've maxed-out the five authorizations that Apple currently allows. If all of your authorizations have been used up before you try to run JHymn, JHymn's FairKeys feature simply won't work until you've freed up at least one authorization slot.

The first thing to do is deauthorize whatever you can still get a hold of to deauthorize. If you can't find anything else to deauthorize or you simply don't know how you got into your maxed-out predicament, the next thing to do is to simply reset all of your authorizations. This reset is an all-or-nothing process, but that's not so scary as it might sound since it's very easy to reauthorize the computers you really want to have authorized after the reset.

To reset all of your authorizations, go into the Music Store in iTunes, click on the account button (upper right-hand corner of the Music Store part of the iTunes Window), sign in, and, if you've used up all of your authorizations, you should see a Deauthorize All button, as seen in this picture. Just click the button and you'll be free to authorize or reauthorize real computers, or JHymn, as needed. Please do remember you need to reauthorize everything when you can get online, so you don't, oh, find yourself on an airplane with your laptop, no internet connection, and a bunch of music files you copied from another computer which you can't play because you can't log in to authorize them.

Why is iTunes telling me I'm not authorized to play my music?

This is likely due to insufficient scrubbing, either pertaining to your music files themselves, or to DRM-related info cached inside your iTunes Music Library. Problems like this are particularly common of late for anyone who has used JHymn or similar software in the past and who has recently updated to iTunes 4.7.1.

The first thing to do if you encounter such problems is to use the latest version of JHymn to re-scrub all of your music. That might not solve all problems, however. JHymn now prevents the kinds of problems that caused snags when updating to 4.7.1, when it unlocks new songs. It does this by making sure that all unlocked songs get deleted from the iTunes Library and then added back in when they're unlocked.

Songs that you've already unlocked, however — that's another matter. The easiest way to fix any lingering problems with being allowed to play your music is to use JHymn's "Force iTunes to rebuild its Library" feature, found in the File menu. Carefully read the dialog that comes up when you select this feature and make sure you understand what it does before proceeding.

An alternative is to remove all of your troublesome songs from iTunes manually, without deleting the actual files, and then add all of those songs back to iTunes. This might mean manually fixing up any playlists these songs were in afterwards.

Why did iTunes just delete a bunch of my songs from my iPod?

This problem is related to the above issue, and the solutions are the same.

I'm getting some error message about Java. Why?

JHymn is written mostly in the Java programming language, and relies on having Java version 1.4 or later installed on your computer. If you're on a Mac, OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) can be updated to Java 1.4.1 via Software Update. OS X 10.3 (Panther) can be updated to Java 1.4.2 via Software Update.

On Windows, Java may or may not have been installed on your computer at all. Some PC makers install Java by default, but Java doesn't get automatically installed along with Windows, nor is it automatically updated via Windows Update. You can go to Sun's web site to download the latest version of Java and install it if necessary.

Some Windows users have been reporting problems with running JHymn even when they appear to have Java 1.4 or later already installed. To be honest, I'm not sure why this happens. I can only guess that the special EXE file "wrapper" used by JHymn — which is supposed to automatically find the best installed version of Java for running a given Java application — somehow gets confused and can't find the right version of Java, or any version of Java at all sometimes.

The only possible solution I can offer if you run into such a problem is this: Go into your Windows Add or Remove Programs Control Panel and remove all current versions of Java. Also check and see if you have Microsoft's old, no-longer-supported Java installed on your computer. You won't find Microsoft's Java in Add or Remove Programs — you'll have to open up a Command Prompt window and type "jview" to check. If you get a response like "'jview' is not recognized..." you're okay — the MS JVM is not installed. If, however, you get a Microsoft copyright notice, usage, options, etc., then the MS JVM is installed.

A special tool, UNMSJVM.EXE, is needed to remove Microsoft's Java, which you can download by clicking here.

Once all old versions of Java have been removed, install the latest version of Java from Sun and (I hope) everything will be okay and JHymn will run for you.

Hey! Why didn't my iTunes Library get updated?

If you've got the checkbox Update iTunes Music Library with unlocked and converted files checked on, you shouldn't, under normal circumstances, have any trouble updating your iTunes Library so that your newly unlocked and converted songs appear in the Library, replacing corresponding original source files in your Library and various playlists.

But because of the script-based techniques used to update the Library, there are some things that can go wrong to cause the update to fail, possibly leaving you in a state where your copy of iTunes has broken links to your old files, and no listings of your new files. It's not the end of the universe if this happens, but it can be an annoyance to fix.

One common reason for Library update failure for Windows users is security software which blocks the execution of scripts. If you have such software, you'll either need to turn off the script blocking features in general, or at least make sure that JHymn is allowed to execute scripts.

Another reason for failure, which can effect both Windows and Mac users, is caused by renaming your iTunes application. On Mac, the iTunes application should simply be named "iTunes", or, if you have file extensions showing, "iTunes.app". On Windows, the iTunes application should simply be named "iTunes", or, if you have file extensions showing, "iTunes.exe". If at some point along the line, however, you have suddenly been overcome by the urge to rename your iTunes application to something like "iTunes 4.7" or "That Apple Music Thing" -- well, don't be surprised if Library updating fails. The scripts used by JHymn rely on iTunes being called "iTunes", and nothing else. If you've changed iTunes' name, please set the application's name back to its original form.

Forget about why it didn't update. How do I fix my Library now?

If you're the kind of computer user whose crowning achievement in the use of computers is managing to answer an e-mail, or spelling "Google"... go find yourself a geek. Quick. You'll need to be comfortable navigating your computer's file system, understanding where iTunes keeps things, and even perhaps working with a console window or AppleScript to fix what has to be fixed here.

The first step is to fix any of the problems described in the previous section if they apply to what went wrong for you.

If you were only unlocking a few files, and you know which files those were, it's probably best to manually repair the associated track listings in iTunes thus:

1. Select a track to fix.
2. Type Ctrl-I (Windows) or Command-I (Mac). (That's an "eye", not an "el".)
3. If the track association was broken, iTunes will ask you to help it locate the correct file. Do so.
4. Repeat for each broken track.

If, however, the above sounds too tedious for the number of files involved, you might be able to recover in a couple of ways.

(To be continued...)