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I'm creating this thread because I've had to reach out to multiple members here via PM regarding this issue:

When you purchase music from iTunes/Apple Music, there is personally identifying information embedded within the M4A files. This information includes the email address and the name associated with the account that was used to purchase the music. When sharing iTunes M4A songs/albums, this information can be found quite easily by anyone who downloads the shared files.

With that in mind, there was a utility created a number of years back, called iTMS Scrubber, which can remove this information from your purchases prior to sharing. It is no longer being developed/maintained, but the latest Windows version (v2.5) does still work. The utility is a bit hard to come by, so I'm sharing it here: http://www.zshare.net/file/euwu18ud6ot8...ber_25.zip/file

There is a readme file included in the .zip archive, but for those wondering how to use it, here's the instructions from the readme:

After the utility has been run, two text files will be created in the directory containing the scrubbed files. These files contain the before & after info from the scrubbing process.

There was a Mac version of the utility also, but from what I can gather, it was only updated to v2.3a and has been reported to not currently work by some people. I do not have a link to the Mac version. If you are a Mac user, I would recommend sending your original files to a Windows user that you trust and having them run the files through the Windows utility for you.

Anyway, I hope this is informative and I'll be keeping a copy of the archive on my PC in case it needs to be re-uploaded in the future.

This post has been edited by otter87 on May 23 2020, 04:49 PM

Removing some tags with MP3Tag wasn't enough?
I may have to reup some things, thanks!

My understanding is that only removing the tags will not work. I haven't made an iTunes purchase in a while, and I haven't payed enough attention to the stuff I've downloaded recently before I run it through the utility. But from what I remember, there is a tag that lists the purchaser's email address, but there isn't one that lists the actual name associated with the account. Also, I'm pretty sure that I tried that once by removing the tag that lists the email address and then running the files through iTMS Scrubber and the "before" text file still showed the email address. I believe this information is stored in a different way within the file that is not read by typical tag editors. Someone who's more knowledgeable may be able to clarify this.

You could try this yourself and report back: remove the email tag from a file that you know hasn't been altered in any way after being initially purchased, then run it through iTMS Scrubber after removing the tag and see if the email address still shows in the "before" text file.

This post has been edited by otter87 on May 23 2020, 07:25 PM

There is another solution that uses ffmpeg through a cmd script:

iTunes PTD Lossless Remover 1.1

I guess this will work until ffmpeg does.

I hadn't heard of this, thanks for the link. The readme states that it removes all metadata. iTMS Scrubber only removes the specific atoms listed in the quote. I would say it's more just an annoyance to have to re-tag the albums, however there is one tag field, ITUNSMPB, that is apparently important for gapless playback (see here). I've never purchased or downloaded an non-stop iTunes release though, so I can't verify this.

This post has been edited by otter87 on May 26 2020, 01:37 AM