The next version of Songbird (0.2.5) will support Apple FairPlay and Windows Media DRM audio playback. Those features are already enabled in the latest nightly build and everyone is encouraged to give those builds a spin. If you’re on Windows you’ll need to have a new-ish version of Windows Media Player (probably 9 or newer) for protected WMA playback and QuickTime for Windows (probably 7 or newer) for FairPlay to work. On OS X you’ll only get FairPlay playback, sorry.

How does this work? We don’t hack out the encryption keys or anything illegal. Songbird supports multiple playback cores so we simply use Apple’s and Microsoft’s own playback engines to do the decoding for us. We use VLC for playback of most file types, but now whenever you play a protected WMA or M4P file we swap in the Windows Media Player or QuickTime core. Sounds easy, right?

Well, no. Not really. The world of DRM is a little (cough) unfriendly, so I figured that I should share some of the war stories and a few tricks for anyone interested in making DRM playback work in their own apps.

It seems both Apple and Microsoft are a little paranoid when it comes to debuggers. I fault Apple a little more than Microsoft in this case for reasons I’ll hit in a second. But be forewarned: using DRM software under a debugger may not work correctly (or at all), and documentation may be totally misleading. What happens? Well…