iTunes Plus: Remove Personal Information and Email Address

June 7, 2007

borrowed blog post from ProfessorIpod

real article here

June 4th, 2007 by professoripod

The new iTunes Plus songs do not have copy protection but still contain your email address and other private information. This information is in the metadata in the music file. If one of your iTunes songs is placed on a P2P site, your personal information will be available for everybody to see. This is great as it is a resistance to people giving all their files away. However, if your music is stolen (through spyware or other means), you might be considered a pirate!

Soon people will release automatic methods for doing this, but you can do it right now with currently available software.

1. Download AtomicParsley for windows or mac.
2. Uncompress it into your music directory
3. Open a command line box in windows (RUN -> cmd.exe) or open the terminal in OSX
4. View all the metadata with the following command:

atomicparsley song.m4u -t
Here is some example output:

Atom “©nam” contains: Everybody Whatever
Atom “©ART” contains: Yoyou
Atom “aART” contains: Yoyou
Atom “©alb” contains: Sandballs for Diggers
Atom “gnre” contains: Rock
Atom “trkn” contains: 1 of 14
Atom “disk” contains: 1 of 1
Atom “©day” contains: 2003-02-14T08:00:00Z
Atom “pgap” contains: 0
Atom “apID” contains: xxxx@xxx.com
Atom “cprt” contains: ℗ null 2002
Atom “cnID” contains: xxxxxx
Atom “rtng” contains: Inoffensive
Atom “atID” contains: xxxxxx
Atom “plID” contains: xxxxxx
Atom “geID” contains: xxxxx
Atom “sfID” contains: United States (143441)
Atom “akID” contains: 0
Atom “stik” contains: Normal
Atom “purd” contains: xxxxxxxxx
Atom “covr” contains: 1 piece of artwork

5. If you want to remove one of the atoms, using the following command:

atomicparsley song.m4a –manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.ATOM”

For example, to remove the email address, one would do the following…

atomicparsley song.m4a –manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.apID”

6. The new file stripped with the information will be created as a new temp song file. Test it in iTunes to make sure it still works before deleting your original.

7. If you want to remove several pieces of metadata at once, you can stack commands like the following:

atomicparsley song.m4a --manualAtomRemove moov.udta.meta.ilst.cnID" --manualAtomRemove "moov.udta.meta.ilst.atID" --manualAtomRemove "moov.udta.meta.ilst.apID"