iPhone's DRM - let my music go!

September 16, 2009 8:46 AM

Does the DRM on iPhone work differently than the DRM on, say, the iPod Classic?

I've got an iPhone 3G as well as a 160 GB iPod Classic, both synced to my home computer (PowerMac G5), which also houses my >26k-track iTunes library. Both devices are set to allow me to manually manage music.

When I take those devices to work and connect them to iTunes on my Windows machine (also authorized by the iTunes Music Store), they work differently. I can play the music on the iPod using iTunes, but I cannot play the music on my iPhone - all the songs are grayed out in iTunes.

Is iPhone different in that regard?

posted by DandyRandy to technology (4 comments total)

yes.
posted by Oktober at 9:00 AM on September 16

to expand, it's not the DRM on the files that's different, it's the DRM on the connection. To prevent people from using the iphone as you want, apple didn't include the disk-mode USB connection that the classic has.
posted by nomisxid at 9:57 AM on September 16 [1 favorite]

Do you have "Manually manage music and videos" checked on one device, and not the other?

iTunes has never allowed playback with automatically synced devices for some reason - if you turn that option off, it will let you play back songs on any computer, and also allows you to add songs from any computer - but it won't automatically copy anything you've added to your library.

I know on the Mac there's software like PhoneView that will let you play back your music regardless of how the sync software is set - there may be cheaper/better and alternatives for Windows, but I'm not familiar enough to know what those are.
posted by agentmunroe at 10:07 AM on September 16

What nomisxid said. The iPhone doesn't support a disk-mode connection for various silly Apple-lockdown reasons.
posted by neckro23 at 2:56 PM on September 16