Hymn (software)
From Free net encyclopedia
hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) is a piece of computer software, and the successor to the PlayFair program. The purpose of hymn, according to its author (who is currently anonymous for fear of legal proceedings), is to allow people to exercise their fair use rights under United States copyright law.
The program allows the user to remove the FairPlay DRM restrictions of tunes bought from the iTunes Music Store. Essentially, this DRM removal is done with no reduction in sound quality. The resultant files can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, including operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works (with a plugged-in iPod) on Mac OS X and many Unix variants and works on Windows (with or without an iPod).
The Mac OS X version includes a drag-and-drop graphical user interface. The other platforms have only a command-line interface at this time. Prebuilt binaries are available for both Mac OS X and Windows, and the source code is available for all platforms. There is also a Java-based GUI version of the program called JHymn.
The program and its source code are available under the GNU General Public License.
Hymn and JHymn will only function with iTunes clients previous to version 6.0, purchasing music with these older versions is still supported by Apple. The hymn project is currently still working on a fix so that their software will work with iTunes clients 6.0 and later.
JHymn has superseded hymn as the official software of The Hymn Project.