SharpMusique was a rewrite in C# of PyMusique (written in Python), both programs were

iTunes Music Store The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...

clients, allowing songs to be downloaded from the iTunes Music Store without

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militai ...

PyMusique

PyMusique was written by Travis Watkins, Cody Brocious, and

Jon Lech Johansen Jon Lech Johansen (born November 18, 1983 in Harstad, Norway), also known as DVD Jon, is a Norwegian programmer who has worked on reverse engineering data formats. He wrote the DeCSS software, which decodes the Content Scramble System used for ...

for the purpose of allowing downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store before DRM was applied to them from a Mac,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, or Windows computer. It was first released via Johansen's website on March 18, 2005. Although the iTunes Music Store's method of applying

FairPlay 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, and was used until April 2009 by the company to protect copyrighted works sold thr ...

DRM to the songs was widely known, PyMusique was the first program to exploit a loophole in the system, allowing users to download songs without the DRM restriction. On March 22, 2005, Apple released an update that rendered PyMusique non-functional. The same day, a new version of PyMusique was released that worked again, only without Windows compatibility. On March 31, 2005, Johansen released SharpMusique, the Windows-compatible port of PyMusique. PyMusique also allowed songs to be re-downloaded for free, in case a user accidentally deleted their purchase. Within a number of days, Apple broke the client by forcing all users to upgrade to iTunes 4.9. In response to Apple's actions, Johansen released PyMusique version 0.4 on March 22, 200

which allows users once again to use PyMusique with Apple's store. With the launch of 0.4, developer Cody Brocious stated on his blog that no future versions of PyMusique would be released with Microsoft Windows support.

SharpMusique

In September 2005, Jon Lech Johansen released SharpMusique, written in C#, which took over where PyMusique left off. The program was kept updated until version 1.0, at which point it was no longer updated. The iTunes protocol changed, and users of SharpMusique were able to release primitive patches to account for the changes until mid-2006, when the protocol changed drastically. Around this time, without public announcement, the download links for SharpMusique and its source were removed from Johansen's website. As a result, it is no longer easily available.

References

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External links

Forbes.com article on Cody Brocious and PyMusique

Neowin.net interview with Cody Brocious
Broken link]
SharpMusique
with links deep in the comments to source packages for linux and windows Free multimedia software ITunes Digital rights management circumvention software