Geek Patrol

QTFairUse in Use

After I wrote about QTFairUse last week, I spent some time actually trying to use QTFairUse. It seems that QTFairUse and the files it produces have enough issues that will probably discourage most users from using it.

Getting

QTFairUse is distributed as source code; in order to use it, you’ll either need a compiler or you’ll have to track down a binary version (most peer-to-peer file sharing networks have binary versions of QTFairUse, but I’m not sure I’d trust these version to be virus- or trojan-free).

Johansen recommends using MinGW to build QTFairUse, but Visual C++ will work too (although you’ll have to figure out how to build it on your own). Building QTFairUse with MinGW is trivial (it’s actually more difficult to install MinGW), and once it’s done all you need to do is run QTFairUse once in order to enable it.

Decoding

In order to get unprotected audio, all you have to do is play a protected audio file (.m4p) in QuickTime. As the protected audio is playing, unprotected audio is written to the QTFairUse.aac file on your desktop. Since the unprotected audio is created as the protected audio plays, rather than all at once, you’ll have to wait until the entire song is played.

When you’re done playing the protected audio, the QTFairUse.aac file will hold a copy of the unprotected audio. Now what?

Playing

The problem you’ll face now is that most audio players don’t support .aac files. While both QuickTime and iTunes support AAC, they only support it when the AAC data is enclosed in an MPEG-4 file. Since QTFairUse only extracts an unprotected AAC file rather than an unprotected MPEG-4 file, neither QuickTime nor iTunes can play the .aac file QTFairUse produces.

On Windows, neither Windows Media Player nor WinAMP (at least without a plugin) are able to play .m4a files, let alone .aac files!

However, faad (Freeware Advanced Audio Decoder) is a notable exception; it was written from the ground-up to support AAC files (i.e., the files that QTFairUse produces). Unfortunately, I had a number of problems getting faad to work properly.

I wasn’t able to build faad under Linux (specifically Debian GNU/Linux 3.0); for some reason the build process wasn’t able to generate the configure script.

I also wasn’t able to build faad under Windows, either; it seems some of the source code required to build faad isn’t included with the package (although it looks like it should be). I spent a bit of time trying to determine whether there was anything else I should download, but it sounded like I had everything I needed.

Fortunately, though, there’s a binary version of the WinAMP plugin available on the AudioCoding.com website. I was able to download it and install it without any problems, and it worked like a champ with .m4a files. Unfortunately it didn’t work all that well with .aac files; while it played the audio, it played it about two times too slowly. Hopefully this problem will be addressed in a later release of faad, but for now while you can listen to the .aac file, it certainly doesn’t sound right!

Conclusion

After spending a bit of time with QTFairUse, I was able to save unprotected audio to a .aac file. Unfortunately, the unprotected audio is created slowly (1X) and (at least with the effort I put into it) unplayable.

For now, most (if not all) users who want unprotected audio are better off burning the protected audio to an audio CD, then ripping the audio to an unprotected file. Not only is the process faster, it’s a lot more straightforward!

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