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Free stuff on iTunes: Death Cab for Cutie inside an iPhone app

2009-01-29 20:43:49 -08:00

I normally hate the advertisement apps that several companies have created for the iPhone, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.

The newest advertisement app is the one for Death Cab for Cutie. As you can guess, it’s free.

The reason I like this one is because it actually includes ten (as of 1.0—eight as of 1.1) DCfC songs at medium quality (AAC, 96 kbps). Good enough for me—certainly good enough for free.

You don’t need an iPhone to use this app. You can easily extract the music from the app bundle and then dispose of what’s left.

After downloading the app, here’s what you have to do.

  1. Switch to the Applications section of iTunes.

  2. Right-click on the DCfC app and click Show in Finder.

    Screenshot of the contextual menu hanging open, with the mouse cursor over the “Show in Finder” command.

  3. You’ll see the .ipa file. Open this in an unzipper application such as Archive Utility, StuffIt Expander, or BetterZip. (BetterZip will let you go straight to the .app bundle, so you should use that if you have it.)

    Screenshot of a Finder window showing the contents of the Mobile Applications folder in the iTunes library folder, with the “DCfC 1.0.ipa” file selected.

  4. In the unzipped folder, find the actual app bundle. (It’ll have a prohibitory sign on it because it’s an iPhone app.)

    Screenshot of a Finder window showing the contents of the Payload folder in the unzipped .ipa folder, with the “DCFC.app” bundle selected.

    Right-click on it, then choose Show Package Contents.

  5. You haven’t far to look, since iPhone apps are old-style flat bundles, not new-style hierarchical bundles.

    In version 1.0, the m4a files were right there. Since version 1.1, they’re not; the app streams them on demand. Open the media.stream.xml file in your favorite text editor, copy each http://[…].m4a URL, and paste it into your browser’s Downloads window.

  6. If you don’t want any of the other features of the app (e.g., its discography or tour dates), delete the app in iTunes.

If you enjoy filling out the Lyrics tab in iTunes and reading along in TuneTagger, you may also want to write a program to read the discography.xml file (also in the app bundle) and copy the lyrics into iTunes. If you write such a program, feel free to link to it in a comment.

UPDATE 2009-02-06: Updated instructions for version 1.1, wherein they stopped bundling the .m4a files in the application.

Categories: iTunes/iPod. | Comments: 0 (feed).

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