DRMed MP3s inside the iTunes/iPod universe?

My wife recently discovered that with iTunes 7.2 (the current version) if you purchase music from the iTunes store, burn a CD, rip the CD with iTunes, you are then unable to put the mp3s on your ipod. You get the error “… was not copied because the file type is not supported by the iPod”.

In other words, you can rip a purchased CD and put it on your ipod, but if you convert DRMed, purchased AAC files and convert them to mp3s (via a burned CD) that doesn’t work. You can also rip a CDRs of purchased iTunes AACs from another computer. But you can’t rip them if they were purchased on your computer.

Apple says this is a bug, and gives a work around. It has been noticed by others.

One of the work-arounds it to rip from a different computer than the one you burned the CDR on. That worked for us.

However, this got me to think about how could this possibly happen. Mp3s should be a standard, and CDs and CDRs should be a standard. “What computer was this CDR made on?” isn’t something normally saved on a CDR. Obviously, it is now. And it carries through to the mp3s too.

iTunes shouldn’t be treating CDRs-made-with-mp3s-on-this-computer as different from CDRs-made-on-a-different-computer. It shouldn’t even know the difference. Clearly, there’s some sort of embedded ID, and an eventual goal of that carrying all the way to the iPod. Ie meta-data carries through AAC->CDR->MP3->iPod. That’s a lot of steps, but that’s what’s going on.

Clearly, iTunes is mucking with either (or both) the mp3 and CDR standards, to do something new that we don’t yet know about.

To be charitable to Apple, this could be the forthcoming mp3 watermarking feature on purchased files, and perhaps they’re trying to have the watermarking also automatically apply to DRMed AAC->CDR->Mp3 conversion process, which is something they haven’t announced.

I’m also wondering if EMI didn’t agree to selling MP3s because Apple proposed a variety of tracking and possibly use-prohibitions layered on top of the MP3 standard. Apple wouldn’t be able to enforce those mp3 restrictions outside of the iTunes/iPod universe, but that might still be enough. In other words, if iTunes-purchased mp3s had certain use restrictions inside the iTunes/iPod product universe, that would help settle the fears of DRM-happy record labels.