iTunes is the world’s biggest online music store. It is probably also the world’s biggest distributor of DRM infested music. Even though, in the past few months, Apple has taken steps to rectify the problem, the chances of you purchasing DRM laced music from iTunes are still high.

So, what is the problem, you say? “I can still listen to all this music on my iPod/iPhone”. “I can still use iTunes to manage all my DRM music”.

DRM ( Digital Rights Management) is a term used to describe procedures which are taken to prevent unauthorized use of the media in question. So, for example, if you have music with DRM purchased from the iTunes store, you will not be able to play them on any media player, other than Apple’s. You will also not be able to convert these files to the MP3 format because Apple, under DRM, doesn’t give you the rights to do so.

But, do not despair. There are ways to get around this and we’ll be teaching you exactly how to do that in this post.

In my personal opinion as both Mac and Windows users, iTunes is the best music player I’ve come across. The simple yet intuitive interface alone is enough to make me ditch other players out there. And there are many other powerful features which hides behind the simplicity of the appearance.

One of the iTunes features that I like most is the rating system. Users can tag any song with one to five stars based on their preferences, and users can sort or filter the playlist based on the rating. A quick glance at someone’s iTunes display and you can clearly tell which songs he/she likes and dislikes.

The rating system really is a great idea; but, and this is a big but (no pun intended), the bigger the song list, the more difficult for users to give rating to each and every song. Can you imagine editing 2376 songs one by one? That’s the size of a tiny part of my current song list. (And I don’t know anybody who has less than 100 songs on their list).

A while back, Damien published a great article on How To Install And Setup Jinzora Media Server In Ubuntu. Jinzora is a great and powerful way to stream your music over the internet, but getting it set up can be somewhat complicated. Today, I thought I’d cover some of the other options that are a little easier to set up, and may work on other platforms.

Collecting music in this era has become much easier. People don’t have a big room with wall shelves full with cassettes and discs anymore. Instead, almost everything has been converted to digital file and is tucked inside a digital storage. Saving real storage space, searching time and eliminating the pile of dust.

On the other side, the convenience of digital music raises another problem: digital file management. Take a peek into your music collection, how many files have their names and information right? Maybe it’s far less than a half. If your collection consists of less than a hundred MP3s, the process of tidying up the wrong names would be a breeze. But everybody I know has thousands of tunes in their library.

While the iTunes store gives you access to a wide range of music and a one-click no-fuss purchase experience, it does come with a DRM restriction that prevents you from playing your favorite track on other devices. On the other hand, Amazon enables you to buy DRM-free high quality MP3 track, but you have to put in the extra effort to go to the Amazon site and search through the extensive database for that particular track. Now, wouldn’t it be great if you can combine the best of both World – search for the song in iTunes and buy the track in Amazon?

Advantageous MP3 is a mini iTunes script that is able to detect which song you are searching at iTunes store and brings you directly to the purchase site at Amazon. It is only 60kb in size and supports both Mac and Windows iTunes.

Often, you have heard a rare nice song from a particular YouTube video and you wish you could just save that song (without the video) into your hard disk. Well, in Ubuntu, you can use UTube Ripper to extract audio from YouTube video and save it as mp3 file.