Thread: iTunes - Remove Personal Information and Email Address from songs

I was looking for this information for days and had to find out for myself. This tutorial is primarily aimed at those who upload their personal iTunes WEB rips to music trackers.

The problem: Purchased iTunes songs contain your real name, and email address when bought. This information is stored in the metadata in the music file.

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Now, you could easily just transcode the album/songs to another format resulting in the tags to be cleaned. However, iTunes use a .mp4 format which we know is a LOSSY format.
Now we know LOSSY > LOSSY = BAD Because information is removed every time the file is encoded/transcoded. This isn’t acceptable on most music trackers.

The solution: atomicparsley

Once downloaded extract it and open up a command prompt in windows and “cd” (directory change) to that of the location where atomicparsley is located.

The command below is useful in displaying all information about the song:
atomicparsley song.m4u –t

(This will list all tags and their values in the same command window making it easy to spot the identifying ones).

Identify the exposed tags and remove them with this command:
atomicparsley song.m4a –manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.TAG”

*TAG has to be replaced with a valid name.

To remove both the application ID and purchase data from an iTunes song one would issue the following command:
atomicparsley song.m4a –-manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.apID” –-manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.purd” –W

If you want to remove all tags then use the command:
AtomicParsley song.m4a –metaEnema

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Now this process can be slightly laborious for each individual song, it would be better if there was a bit more of an automated process to remove the personal information.

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iTMS Scrubber (for Win and Mac) to the rescue!
This little tool removes uses AtomicParsley to remove all account-related information from your files.

Make sure to put the album in question into the directory where itms is located and drag and drop onto the “itms-scrubber.cmd”
*Bacup the folder to another place before you do this.*

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The program will automatically open up AtomicParsley and remove the information on all files in the ALBUM folder in seconds.
iTMS Scrubber is nice enough to create a log file in the song folder with a before and after displaying the removed tags. Open the song in itunes to see the “NAME” and “EMAIL” fields empty. The file is now ready to be uploaded onto the net.

I hope you find this tutorial somewhat helpful.