Apple Music files are streaming with FairPlay DRM limited. In other words, you can’t play and listen to the music on any other media players except for iTunes and any devices on which Apple Music is unavailable. Even if you subscribe to Apple Music and you can download Apple Music songs, you will see the following error when you try to play DRM-protected files on your media players.
“Could not demux asf stream: drm protected streams are not supported.”
Why other players do not support to play these DRM-protected streaming files? What is DRM protection and why it cannot be supported? If you are new to the technology world, you might not have enough knowledge about it. Well, there is nothing to worry about this as we are about to give you some brief knowledge about DRM protection, what is it, and why some media players can not stream files with this protection.
FairPlay is a digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Apple Inc. It is built into the MP4 multimedia file format as an encrypted AAC audio layer. Only authorized devices are allowed to play the content.
The restrictions imposed by FairPlay, mainly limited device compatibility, have sparked criticism, with a lawsuit alleging antitrust violation that was eventually closed in Apple’s favor, and various successful efforts to remove the DRM protection from files, with Apple continually updating its software to counteract such projects.
What exactly can you do, or more to the point, what can’t you do with Apple Music copy-protected audio files?
Limited portable hardware compatibility: Currently, if you download songs and albums from Apple Music, the files you download are in the M4P format. These are encrypted, which means you can not play them on any non-Apple device.
Restricted number of computers: Unlike DRM-free songs that can play on an unlimited number of computers, protected songs are only playable on up to five authorized machines.
iTunes is the only software media player you can use: FairPlay DRM ties you to iTunes. As a result, you are forced to use Apple’s software even if your preferred media player is VLC Player or Windows Media Player.
Now that you know why you receive the error when you play Apple Music on other players. These Apple Music songs under the protection of DRM are only supportable on some specific devices or software with DRM authorization. To remove DRM from Apple Music songs, you can use Pazu Apple Music Converter which is a professional Apple Music DRM removal. You can use it to unlock DRM and convert Apple Music to MP3, M4A, FLAC, and other formats.
Armed with a top-ranking conversion core, Pazu Apple Music Converter provides the ability to download songs from Apple Music with the original audio quality, enabling you to enjoy Apple Music songs offline on any player without caring about the quality loss.
It works at 10X speed, which enables you to get Apple Music songs downloaded in MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, AIFF or M4A format in a short time. The output M4A and MP3 files will contain the ID3 Tags after converting, such as title, artist, album, artwork, track number, disc number, year, comment, genre, AlbumArtist, composer.
After you download and convert Apple Music songs with Pazu Apple Music Converter, you can play these songs on any player without the above error. Here we’ll show you how to get DRM-free Apple Music songs.
Download, install and run Pazu Apple Music Converter on your Mac or Windows. Click the key icon to activate the full version if you have purchased a license, otherwise you can only use the trial version.
Click the Sign in button and enter your Apple ID.
The default output format is lossless M4A. Pazu Apple Music Converter also supports converting Apple Music to MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV and AIFF. You can also customize output file name with any combination of title, artist, album, playlist index and track ID.
Follow the on-screen instructions to choose the playlist or album you want to convert. Click Add songs.
By default, all songs in the playlist/album will be checked. If there are songs you don’t want to convert, please uncheck the box. Then click Convert button to start downloading songs to the format you choose.
After conversion, click below folder icon to quickly locate the downloaded songs.
Free trial version allows you to convert 3 minutes of each song, to get the full version, please purchase a license.
Download Apple Music to MP3, M4A, etc.