People nowadays tend to buy music from online music store, such as iTunes, the dominance in the paid online music market, operated by Apple Inc. iTuens sells its music at around $1 per song, $10 per album, and only allows people to play their purchased music on not more than 5 computers. If you want to take the music library away with iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch, Zune, PSP, Creative Zen and other MP3 players, you must use some other third-party applications to convert the m4p or m4a music to mp3 first.

There are many third-party applications available to remove iTunes DRM in the market, ant they are largely identical but with minor differences. So far as I know, there are two major technologies used in these applications:

1. Virtual Recording:

When search in Google, you will find NoteCable and TuneCable, which are the two leading third-party applications in converting m4p to mp3 using virtual recording technology. After test, you will find out that NoteCable is compatible with both Windows XP & Vista systems.

As for TuneCable, it is particularly developed for XP users, and its converting speed is much faster compared to other recording staff. The most powerful feature of TuneCable M4P Converter is it can encode maximum 4 songs at the same time with top digital quality at speeds up to 60x which make it stand out from it's competitors in the virtual audio recording market. (Click here for the instruction on how to use TuneCable to convert m4p to mp3)



Both NoteCable and TuneCable are working independently to convert the m4p to mp3, so you have to open iTunes first to authorize the computer to play the mp4 file by entering your Apple ID and password. If you convert the m4p files without getting your computer authorized, the output mp3 won't have any sound.

2. Virtual Burning:

The virtual burning technology is widely used in most m4p converters. Entering "m4p to mp3 virtual burning", NoteBurner M4P Converter is listed on the top, following are Tuneclone, Tunebite, Tune4Win, ect. Although all these applications are using virtual burning tech, NoteBurner M4P Converter is much more powerful and stable. The current version of NoteBurner is compatible with Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X. The converting speed is amazingly super, less than 20 seconds for a four minutes song, when using NoteBurner with iTunes 8 to convert DRM m4p files. Unlike other m4p converters, NoteBurner Windows' version has more output options for choice, such as aac, flac, ogg.



Using virtual burning to burn iTunes DRM protected files is very convenient for users who have large iTunes music library. You can either burn the existing playlist or create a new playlist for selected songs. (Note: It's recommended to create a new playlist for burning the m4p files, since you have only 7 trials for one playlist.) Testing with NoteBurner M4P Converter and you will find that it has the ability to convert more than one-thousand songs at a time with ID3 tag info intact and excellent audio quality, the same quality as the original songs. (Click here to for the instruction on how to use NoteBurner with iTunes)

To sum up, no matter what kind of technology, virtual audio recording and virtual audio burning, the third party application uses, the aim is clear: to make our music free from apple's annoying DRM restriction, and save our time from burning those music to bunches of audio CDs!