iTunes music has been DRM free since 2009 (with some exceptions, probably).
Was that retroactively applied? Because my music from pre-2009 remained DRM'd, but maybe I just needed to re-download them. On top of that, it was all AAC, and I regularly had to convert the files to be usable anywhere but Apple's products. It became such a chore, that I gave up on the Apple music ecosystem entirely, and I don't really have any regrets about it.
Same here. I had 2 or 3 ipods back in the day and loved it although they had a tendency to fail on me. Eventually, I decided to remove my paid-for downloads off of my ipod. That is when I discovered Apple's DRM and the fact that iTunes was a totally closed universe. I had to abandon all my tunes and I was very mad. That was maybe 2007ish? I have not owned another Apple product of any kind since. They lost me for life not that it seems to have hurt them any.
VLC has supported AAC from at least 2006 onwards [1]. Yeah conversion has always been a pain in the butt but back in the time you had to convert between everything all the time anyway (the nastiest example being wma-based devices like the Zune).