I purchase all of my music through Google Play, and I primarily use their web application to listen to it. As a precaution, I also use the Music Manager application to keep a local backup of all of this music on my NAS.
Recently, I wanted to switch to a new Google Account because I was changing primary email addresses. Before doing this, I made sure the music manager had downloaded any purchased music to my NAS because I will be deleting the old Google Account permanently.
Once I had verified the music had been downloaded, I logged out in the Music Manager application, and logged in under my new account. At this point, I had to wait for ALL of my music to be re-uploaded to Google’s servers.
After the music had uploaded, there were 17 songs that could not be uploaded because I had purchased them under a different account. (Apparently not of all the music contains DRM?)
You can see the error in the troubleshooter –
“Song was purchased with another Google Play account”
A little digging led me understand that Google hides their DRM in a hidden ID3 tag that is not easily removable by conventional means. This digging, however, also led me to a Python utility that could do it – and so, into the world of Python.
First, I had to install Python, which was dead easy – https://www.python.org/downloads/ *Note: I am on a Windows machine, and the utility I will show you apparently requires version 2.7 of Python, so get that one :)
During the installation, I let the installer add python.exe to my PATH variable.
Once the installation was complete, I launched a command prompt and installed ‘eyeD3‘ using pip:
eyeD3-install
Now, navigate to your music directory (mine is on my NAS, mapped to my computer as “M:”)
cd /d M:
Execute one simple command, and let it run (depending on how much music you have, it could take a while)
python -m eyed3.main --remove-frame PRIV ./
You should now see a lot of text flowing through your console output. That’s eyeD3 doing its thing. Let it run. Go grab a snack.
Once completed, the Google Music Manager picked up on the fact that the files had changed on disk, and started to re-upload them – without error I might add!
This post, "Remove DRM From Google Play Music", first appeared on https://www.codingwithcalvin.net/remove-drm-from-google-play-music/