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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

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jMyles·

> DRM free digital music from all of the record labels

Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?

Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

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Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.

https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/

While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format

ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011. https://macosforge.github.io/alac/

Wow. How did I miss that!!!

The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple

I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.

A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.

Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?

If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.

Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.

I don’t know about Mountain Fever, but for anything I haven’t been able to find on Bandcamp, I’ve been able to find on Qobuz.

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