Hymn (software)

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The correct title of this article is hymn (software). The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

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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.

Most DRM removal programs rely on re-compressing the media that is captured after it is output by iTunes. This causes some loss in quality. However, hymn can remove DRM with no reduction in sound quality, since it captures the raw AAC stream generated by iTunes as it opens each song, and saves this data using a compression structure identical to that of the original file, preserving both the quality and the small file size. 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, on many Unix variants, and also on Windows (with or without an iPod).

The Mac OS X version includes a drag-and-drop graphical user interface. All 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.

JHymn superseded hymn as the official software of The Hymn Project.

JHymn and hymn will only function with iTunes clients previous to version 6.0. However, purchasing music with these older versions is no longer 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. The Hymn website has announced that, because users can no longer purchase music using iTunes 5 or older, removal of iTunes DRM for now is best accomplished with the use of MyFairTunes6 or QTFairUse6. These programs currently work with the latest version of iTunes (7.0.2 as of December 2006).