Hi,

At work, I sometimes purchase music from the ITunes store (on a Mac). I would also like to play this same music at home on my Mandriva Linux 2006 box. However, I cannot seem to find a player that will play it. Amarok says that it will play MP4 (the actual extension of the music files are .m4p, if that matters), but when I try to open the file in Amarok, I get the message "Some media could not be loaded (not playable)". If there a player that will play this type of file for Linux?

Thanks very much for any help.

.m4p file extension is an mp4 format.

The culprit is probably the brm, makes things hard.

I do not have any mp4 files with drm to test but xmms has a plugin for mp4
There is always the option to hunt down the iTunes port to linux but that may be hard to find since it did not honer drm - heard about it some time ago but never looked into it.

Dose iTunes work under wine :-(

keep me posted

M4P and MP4 are *technically the same* except M4P have some nasty a** DRM on them that won't play with anything except apple-crap ie iTunes and the iPod. That's the stuff you buy from the iTunes Store. MP4 are the same audio codec but they are not DRMed up the wazoo. MP4 should play if you've got the faac and faad libs installed. You'll get the M4Ps to play if you 1) find an app to rip the DRM off them and turn them into regular MP4s 2) find an app that can play DRMd crapple iTunes stuff, which I don't know of.

Wow, sounds like a pain. I started buying music off of iTunes because it was simply easier than using file-sharing services. If the songs are Linux-incompatible (without a lot of work on my part), I might just go back to file-sharing. That's ridiculous that M4Ps are so difficult to play on anything but iTunes.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if any of the other legal music download sites have music in more standard formats?

as far as I know all the music sold on line has drm and know some of the audio cds have it too

http://www.emusic.com
They are by far the best commercial online music store simply because their music has NO DRM. It is just a plain old vanilla mp3 file which will play on anything and everything easily. The only caveat is that a lot of popular music is not available because the record companies are reluctant to allow their music to be (even legally) distributed without any DRM (as if DRM matters.) At this point DRM only serves to discourage honest users (such as you) who want to buy their music and enjoy it in their own way, on their own system. It in no way discourages dishonest people (ie "pirates") because they are not impeded by the DRM in any way. The windows DRM (PlaysForSure) and the Apple FairPlay DRM have been and will be cracked forever and ever only hurting paying customers and never the pirates.

http://www.videolan.org
VLC Media player

You could always burn an audio cd from itunes with those songs, and then rip the cd back into itunes.