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iTunes Plus: Remove Personal Information and Email Address
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: â„— 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"
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18 Responses to ' iTunes Plus: Remove Personal Information and Email Address '
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on June 13th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
wtf is this! Tell us how to remove the all atoms present within each file, I don’t care about erasing partial stuff!
Also is there a batch command or something that would let us erase all the atoms at once, I’m tired of this crap you people gotta get with it!
on June 14th, 2007 at 7:59 am
Sam, the shumuck:
Erasing all the atoms are trivial… however, then your files would lose their valuable tags like the artist, title, album info, etc.
FYI: the command to blitz all tags is the following:
AtomicParsley song.m4a –metaEnema
on June 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am
i gave it a try. even if you delete all of the ilst atoms, iTunes will still read a “Purchased By” field with your name in it. Also, the “kind” remains “Purchased AAC”. so, the file still contains plenty of information that will identify that the file was bought, and who it was bought by. perhaps someone will come up with a good utility. but this one isn’t it.
maybe someone knows all the atoms to delete. but something tells me that you would have to “modify” one of the atoms, rather than delete it. and AtomicParsley only lets you modify a small subset of atoms.
on June 28th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
The following should fix the atoms, AFAIK, but leave the good tags in:
#!/usr/bin/perl
##
# A N O N C P . P L
#
# a script that takes the unix cp file specification options
#
# perl anoncp.pl source_file target_file
# perl anoncp.pl source_file ... target_directory
#
# which reads the source file(s) and copies them to the
# destination stripped of all the user identification gunk
# that apple adds on iTunes "DRM free" songs
#
# NB: make sure you install the latest version of the
# most excellent Audio::M4P::QuickTime perl module.
##
use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp;
use File::Basename;
use Audio::M4P::QuickTime;
my $usage = q{
usage:
perl anoncp.pl source_file target_file
perl anoncp.pl source_file ... target_directory
};
@ARGV >=2 || croak "not enough files specified", $usage;
my $destDN = pop(@ARGV);
my $destFN = $destDN if (! -d $destDN && @ARGV == 1);
$destDN = dirname($destFN) if( $destFN);
-d $destDN || croak $destDN, ": is not a directory", $usage;
(-r $destDN && -w _) || croak $destDN, ": cannot access ", $usage;
foreach my $m4aFN (@ARGV) {
my $qt = Audio::M4P::QuickTime->new( file => $m4aFN );
$qt->FindAtom("mp4a") || croak "$m4aFN: not a mpeg 4 file\n\t";
$qt->CleanAppleM4aPersonalData();
my $toFN = $destFN ? $destFN : $destDN . basename($m4aFN);
$qt->WriteFile($toFN);
}
0;
on July 15th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
@Sam: I prefer to leave the useful metadata (artist and track info, for example) and only remove the personal data
@b: Yes, there is an additional name field that can be seen with an Hex editor. If I remove that, iTunes cannot see the name anymore
@bill: I cannot install the required perl package: Too many required packages missing. I gave up after manually installing a few.
on July 15th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
OK, I learne how to use the cpan command and installed the package. I can confirm that your perl script works and it removes all the purchase-related metadata AND the name tag from the file, while leaving album info etc. intact.
Good work. Now on to create a GUI with Automator.
on August 3rd, 2007 at 3:57 pm
I found a way to validate your mp3 files, it’s called mp3val, just search on google and download it.
I was hoping to find something to check m4a files and verify those but it seems no people have taken an interest in that.
I was wondering, if I strip the tags out of m4a files do they still contain atoms or are atoms only present within the tags?
on October 18th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Used A’Parsley to purge ALL meta “metaEnema” on purchased AAC, and still found my name floating in the HEX dump of the resulting temp.m4a.
Can’t seem to shake the data outta the file.
CAUTION!
on November 24th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
I wasn’t planning on sharing my files, but I did think it might be useful to strip out the information in case I lost my ipod… If we convert to another format does that truly get rid of the personal information?
on February 28th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Note that cleaning your Apple ID from the Meta Data Atom is *not* sufficient for anonymization. You also need to wipe moov.trak.mdia.minf.stbl.stsd.pinf.
on April 24th, 2008 at 11:56 am
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on April 28th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
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on August 2nd, 2008 at 2:40 am
i am tired of this scarap, I lost my ipod… If we convert to another format
on August 4th, 2008 at 5:35 am
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on August 7th, 2008 at 4:59 am
i am wondering if i stripp,but I did think it might be useful to strip out the information in case I lost my ipod.
on November 27th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
For those interested, AtomicParsley video.mp4 –metaEnema (video decrypted by Requiem) still shows the purchaser’s name in the resulting file.
Used:
AtomicParsley version: 0.9.0 (utf8)
Requiem 1.8.2
on January 31st, 2009 at 9:49 am
@bill: I am getting the following error:
“Can’t locate Audio/M4P/QuickTime.pm in @INC”
Any idea how to correct this?
@germ: have you created a GUI with Automator? If so, would you mind making it available for download?
Thanks
on June 29th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
or get them off the easy way:
1) reveal hidden files and folders (if you don’t know how to do it in terminal, download Deeper or Cocktail from the apple site, which are both free utilities that are handy in a number of other ways, and click find the option to show hidden files in the finder)
2) navigate to /ipodvolume/ipod_control/music/ and you’ll find the folders f00 –> f49 just as you would on a PC.