Cannot use the purchased song from iTunes

Unfortunately there have been still quite a few songs at the iTunes Store that are not free of DRM. I got trapped by this occasionally. It can happen with special offers - 100 songs for just a few dollars. Or when the artist or the company are refusing to remove the DRM for special songs. It is not much money, but annoying if we are buying the songs to use with a slideshow or as a movie sound track. And the iTunes Store does not show the fact, that the song is a protected AAC Audio file, when we buy it.

I have deleted most of the protected songs, that I accidentally purchased with DRM, that are of no use to me this way, but here is still one of them, purchased in 2012, years after the DRM should have been removed.

With iMovie 10 the way to access your iTunes songs is to open a project, click on the Audio tab at the top left of your screen, and then click on iTunes in the iMovie sidebar of the project. The available songs will be displayed in the browser. Try that procedure and see if you can access your song.

iTunes songs purchased after year 2009 should be free of DRM protection and are available for use in iMovie. Songs purchased before year 2009 would be DRM protected and not available.

Any song that was acquired from Apple Music, no matter what year, carries DRM protection and cannot be used in an iMovie project. Downloading it into your iTunes library will not remove that protection.

When you do a Get Info on the song either in the iTunes Media on your hard drive, or in your iTunes library by control-clicking on the song and then clicking on Song Info/File, it will show whether or not the song is protected. An unprotected song should be usable in iMovie. Since that does not appear to be the case in your situation, try dragging the song onto your desktop and from there drag it into iMovie.

If still no luck, try deleting preferences with the following procedure:

Open iMovie while holding down the Option and Command keys and select to delete preferences in the box that appears. iMovie will open in a new library. Reopen your old library to get back to your projects. Now see if you can access your song.

If still no luck, try repurchasing the song and see if that works.

-- Rich

When I subscribed to the trial version of Apple Music, I could not use any of the Apple Music on my Mac with either iMovie, or Photos for Mac, or GarageBand or Logic Pro X. Using them in another application would have allowed to export the song in a different format, with the copyright removed. On my macs I can use only songs with the kind "Purchased AAC audio file", "AAC audio file", "Matched AAC Audio File", "MPEG audio file", in iMovie or Photos or GarageBand, but not any "Apple Music AAC Audio File", or "Protected AAC audio file".

The iTunes info, by not designating the song as protected is indicating, or at least implying, that it is not protected. However, as Léonie points out, sometimes iTunes does not show a song as protected when in fact it is.

The song likely is protected since it it unavailable in iMovie and the Finder info shows it as protected.

You might need to purchase the song from another source. It probably is illegal to try to defeat DRM.

Try exporting your iMovie iOS project (the editable project) that contains the troublesome clip, to your Mac using Air Drop. (Your iOS device needs to be within 30 feet of your Mac and you need AirDrop enabled.) It will appear in your Mac's download folder. Then, from within iMovie Mac do a File/Import iOS project. The iOS project will import into an iMovie Mac project where it can be edited just as if you initially created it there. See if the song now plays.

-- Rich