Requiem For a Tune

I wanted to listen to some of Fliss' music that she had recently brought. However unlike CD's tunes purchased via iTunes require a bit more work to get playing on anything other than the iTunes it was bought on or a limited number of Apple Firmware iPods.

There exists a simple analog hole which means you can burn the CD and then re-rip it in a format of your choice. However that's a lossy process (not to mention not very environmentally friendly). It's also silly as my Rockbox'ed iPod can quite happily deal with AAC coded files if they where slipped of their mathematical shackles.

Apple have done a fairly complete job C&Ding Requiem off the net but it still survives via various torrent sites and Freenet pages, helpfully in source form. It works pretty well although it did have a few interesting behaviours, the first being you need to decrypt the source files in place. This is when I ran into the limitations of the rather sparse BSD find/xargs implementations. In the end I wrote a little piece of perl this morning to run through the whole list. At least the 900 or so tracks that had been purchased can no longer disappear in a little puff of logic now :-)