Long ago, to remove Digital Rights Management from my music tracks, I started with the rigamarole of burning them to a CD from iTunes then re-ripping them back to iTunes, fresh, sparkling clean and DRM-free.

After I had a accumulated a small stack of CDs I never used from this method, I thought of just reusing a CDRW, erasing and burning over and over, even if I just had one track to clean - I didn’t have to wait to fill up a CDR with DRMed songs just to save a little money.

5thirtyone.com shows us an even easier way that doesn’t involve burning digital media at all, and is so simple I smacked myself on the head and said, dang, why didn’t I think of that?

One caveat - you’d need to have iMovie HD on your system.

The basic idea, in a nutshell, is for your to import the DRMed track into iMovie as a soundtrack, export it to iTunes as AIFF, then convert it to AAC within iTunes then just manually adding back the meta data and artwork. A little tedious, but no more ripping and burning to CD. And easier, as 5thirtyone.com points out, to create an Automator sequence to do this by the numbers every time you need to strip DRM from a track.

More detailed instructions and explanations from 5thirtyone.

There must be something seriously wonky with the dotMac Web Gallery, because the new iPhoto 7 that’s part of the iLife ‘08 suite is also being updated to address issues with it. If you remember just recently, iMovie from the same suite was also updated for the same reason. Either that, or the new apps really need more work.

So heads up, iPhoto 7.0.2 is available as a 10.2MB download via Software Update, or a direct 8.8MB download on the Apple site. Aside from fixing that thing with the Web Gallery, it also addresses issues with editing books and rebuilding thumbnails, plus a lot of other minor problems and issues.

The controversial iMovie ‘08 app from the iLife ‘08 suite just got an update - 7.0.1, available through Software Update or via a direct 9MB download.

iMovie’s new version is controversial because of accusations that it’s a dumbed-down version, or more a downgrade than an upgrade to the previous version, since some major features seemed to have been deliberately removed. Some users say they would have preferred not to have gotten this particular upgrade had they known this would happen. Additionally, it has pretty high hardware requirements, and will not port older iMovie files from previous versions. Doh!

For non-Intel Mac users, the app is notorious as well because it’s the only component in the suite that requires an Intel or at least a 1.95GHz G5 processor and will not install on older Power PC Macs, even though the rest of the suite will. As usual Apple is vague on the specifics of this update, except to say that it addresses .Mac Web Gallery issues and improves stability of the app. The biggest disappointment with the update is that it does not restore the omitted features, as some had hoped. (For 9mb, what did you expect?)