I can't remember if someone posted about this or not, but if you don't mind breaking the law (US) and you want to play an itunes tune on your Empeg:

1) Download VLC (www.videolan.org)
2) Buy iTunes Song
3) Open VLC
4) Settings=>Preferences=>General Settings=>Audio, change Audio output module to "File audio output"
5) Save Preferences
6) File=>Quick Open ... Select your iTunes tune
7) It will playback at 1x to a file named "audiofile.wav" in your VLC folder (you can change that file in the Modules=>Audio Output=>aout_file preferences)
8) Encode with your favorite MP3 encoder

I'm sure there are 26 other ways to do this in VLC -- there are a crazy number of options ... If anyone figures out how to get better than 1x, let me know.

ms

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=4004

The program linked there will stream out the contents to a new AAC encoded file in a few seconds and preserve the tags. Then you can use dbPowerAmp (or the program of your choice) to transcode it to another format.

*bump*

The program PlayFair was just posted on macrumors. I actually removes the FairPlay DRM from the AAC file. It needs compiling, but supposedly it works. Also, it'll only work on songs that you own (i.e. not illegal). It uses the key associated with your machine to remove the DRM, so songs that other people have downloaded from iTunes that you do not own would not be hackable.

- trs

I believe this is the same library that VLC uses, but this thing is a hell of a lot easier to hook up. This thing works great ... I just playfair <input.m4p> <output.mp4> then dbPowerAmp it into an mp3 and everything's $$$.

Has anyone gotten this to compile on Windows? It compiles fine on Linux, but when I tried to compile it on cygwin it fails (though it gets reasonably far).

ms

Needs an iPod or Windows. Bah.

Now all we need to do is crack wma and the world will be right again.

The downside is that Hymn/FairPlay has trouble with files over 20MB in size (audiobooks).