How To Authorize A Computer For iTunes

One of the most asked questions and forgotten tasks has to be how to Authorize a computer for iTunes to play protected DRM music downloaded from the Apple iTunes store.

When you authorize one of your computers you are helping to protect the copyright of the music, or movie content you have purchased. If you buy copy protected music from the iTunes store, also known as DRM,  which stands for Digital Rights Management, you are allowed to play them on up to 5 different computers which can be all Mac or Pc or a mix of both. If you have songs you have loaded say from your own CDs or downloaded songs from iTunes Plus they do not need to be authorized, you are free to do whatever or play these songs on as many computers as you choose.

To authorize one of your computers to play these certain copy protected songs, you select  the song or songs and you can first try to play it and if it won’t play you will get a message window saying you are not authorized to play this song on this computer blah blah blah and then asking you if you want to authorize this song to play on this computer. You will then be prompted for your Apple ID and Password which hopefully you have written down somewhere. Enter the correct information and click authorize and you should be able to play your song or songs on that computer. I selected all my purchased music with the select all key and then authorized all my purchased music for that computer and then I was done. You should be able to do the same.

 If you have more than one account that you purchased songs from and you try to authorize all songs you may get a message stating this or that song wasn’t purchased under this account so you’ll have to enter the correct account name you used to purchase the song to authorize this song or album. Yes this is a pain and I would recommend not purchasing these type of protected files and go buy the iTunes plus and you own these songs just like purchasing a CD unless you want to save a few dollars here and there.