Although I have used Macs for ten years or more I have just now purchased my first song via iTunes download.

I don't use my Mac as a music machine, I have a good stereo system [remember those] in my study for CD playing. But I like to burn some CDs to a copy CD to play in my car. So that is all I have used iTunes for so far.

I have read about copy protection and so forth but not taken much notice. And I have searched the MacTalk forums but most discussions appear too esoteric or legalistic for me.

So my questions are:

1 Can I legally burn my iTunes downloaded song to a CD for my personal use?

2 How do I know if the song is somehow copyright protected.

3 If the song is copyright protected will it burn on to a CD? [I don't wish to waste a CD trying to burn the song to it just to find out.]

Pardon the newbie questions. If this is the wrong forum to place these questions, somebody please redirect this post.

From Apple:

Songs purchased from the iTunes Store can be burned to audio CDs and data CDs an unlimited number of times. However, each unique playlist can only be burned to an audio CD 7 times.

You can tell if a song purchased from iTunes Store is copy protected by looking at its info within iTunes. It will say Kind: Protected AAC Audio File, and will show a file extension of .m4p.

The only stuff on iTunes that isn't protected are those labelled 'iTunes Plus', and the majority of podcasts (yes, I have found some podcasts have copy protection).

But if the files are "Protected" or not, you can still burn them.

Thanks

I just assumed that somehow or other if a song was copy protected then I would not be able to burn ["copy"] it to a CD. Obviously I had the wrong meaning of the word "copy".

Cheers

Nah, DRM just locks the file to the user, their iPods, and 5 computers. It's to prevent filesharing, not audio cd burning.

When buying from the iTunes store the file will be DRM protected unless the file has a blue '+' icon next to it (meaning iTunes Plus, which is DRM free). If you got the file from somewhere other than iTunes and it plays in iTunes then it mustn't have DRM.

Overall it doesn't really matter though because you can burn the DRM protected music (just don't give it to anyone ).

In very vague terms;

1. Yes
2. If it's not labelled 'iTunes Plus', it is protected (that's for the songs you bought from iTunes)
3. Yes

If you want to avoid DRM, just burn the songs to a CD, and rip back to the computer.

That's why they invented CD-RW