Well, I decided to install Itunes (what the hell, I try to install everything else in Crossover). I was diappointed to learn of the no CD burning support, but went and tried it anyway. Installation was a little flaky as it hung, but I ran repair and it installed fine.

Next, I wasn't getting any sound, so I consulted the FAQ and configured sound output accordingly. Still wasn't getting any sound, checked the FAQ and had to configure Crossover for an ALSA backend. Once that was done, I had no problems downloading, browsing, and playing music in Itunes.

My one dilemna was that I wanted the music in mp3 format, since I use jinzora to stream my music to my other computers. Without CD burning, I was going to have to find a different way. I ran across a program called JHymn which does the conversion process. I downloaded the source and built it for Linux (a little bit of a task) and I finally have what I need.

I now run Itunes in Crossover to download the songs I want, and then I convert and stream from there. I'm happy. :)

You can also do this with Jon Lech Johansen's FairKey's and DeDRMS programmes, which are pretty simple to install and use. The binaries on his website are .NET, but they run perfectly on Mono under linux. I then use the following script to convert specific files to .wav for burning to cd :

!/bin/bash

cp "$1" /tmp/
tmpfile=/tmp/$(basename "$1")
/opt/mono/mono/bin/mono /opt/itunes/DeDRMS.exe "$tmpfile"
faad "$tmpfile"
rm "$tmpfile"

if [ "$2" != "" ]; then
echo "Moving file"
mv "/tmp/$(basename "$1" .m4p).wav" "$2"
else
mv "/tmp/$(basename "$1" .m4p).wav" "$(dirname "$1")"
fi

echo "All done"

I was using hymn (not JHymn) a while back but this was broken by the iTunes 4.7 forced upgrade, which also broke JHymn. I intrigued to know how you got JHymn going, I think it does have the advantage of a nice GUI, compared to my little script.