Hello all, I recently bought a DAP and I want to put music on it using my Apple Music subscription. I quickly found out that this isn’t possible, all music offered under Apple’s Music subscription is DRM-protected which means you can’t just get a file of a song and put it on an SD card. I searched the web and have possibly found a solution, it is a software called NoteBurner. It essentially bypasses the DRM protection and allows you to download all your music into different high-quality audio formats while keeping the original data (artist/album name, album cover, etc). I thought this was a bit suspect at first so I decided to download it and give it a try since they have a free version. After I downloaded the song using NoteBurner I loaded up Spek to authenticate the quality of the file. I have another file of the same song that I torrented a while ago that I used to compare, the uploader claims that it was a CD rip. The files look similar but I’m still doubtful. I’m not too experienced in this field so I was hoping I could get some advice on whether or not NoteBruner is legit and truly produces high-quality FLAC files from Apple Music. I’ll attach images of the spectrograms for 3 files, the CD rip, NoteBurner, and a free mp3 of the same song for comparison. The NoteBurner file is only 1 minute long because the free trial limits the time.
The problem here is that you’d need to compare the NoteBurner file to the file that Apple is serving. Comparing it to a CD rip or any other file may not yield the expected results as there’s no guarantee it is from the same master.
It’s totally possible to maintain full quality by capturing the digital audio output. Not sure how NoteBurner works, does it require you to play through an entire song to rip it? If so it should maintain 100% quality. Maybe there’s other ways too, but that’s beyond my knowledge.