Well Beatles fans, the wait continues. Here's the news, which is still good (from Playlist website):

Apple, EMI offer higher-quality DRM free downloads
By Jim Dalrymple


Apple and EMI announced at an event on Monday that EMI’s entire music and video catalog will be available in May without any digital rights management protection. The two companies will also offer higher quality sound files of songs, but the songs will come at a higher price.

“In all of research consumers tell us overwhelmingly that they would be willing to pay a higher price for a digital music file that they could use on any player,” said Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group. “It’s clear to us that interoperability is important to music buyers and is a key to unlocking and energizing the digital business.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the high-quality songs will be encoded at 256kbps instead of 128kbps used for the standard songs. The new songs will carry a higher price of $1.29 — $0.30 higher than the stand $0.99 of the current songs.

Users will not be forced to pay the higher prices if they don’t want to. Jobs said the higher-quality DRM-free songs will be addition to the store, not a replacement for what is already being offered. Users can still choose to purchase DRM-encoded tracks for $0.99.

Albums with high-quality audio will remain at the same price as the current albums.

Jobs said Apple would be contacting the rest of the music companies to get them to follow EMI’s example. Jobs said he expects well over half of the songs on the iTunes Store to be DRM-free by the end of the calendar year.

Gosh...No more DRM (What the hell is DRM???)

Digital Rights Management technology. Basically, it limits the number of devices you can put your purchased music onto. In theory it can also limit you to X number of burns to disc or even X number of plays. DRM is sometimes also abbreviated as PITA.

Pass It To Althea?

The iTunes DRM has never been an issue for me. Once you burn the tracks to a cd, you can rip them with any audio ripper and convert them to any format you choose (and use those files to burn as many cds as you want to.) Maybe this simple work-around is why they are seeing that the DRM is a waste of time (and another way they are accomplishing nothing other than ticking off their paying customers once again.)