iTunes mp3s plant malware and destructive content

Hi, looking for similar experiences here. I use SONAR 8 Producer purly as a "hobyist" for no commercial gain.

I recently did a friend a favour by putting together a simple medly of dance music for a relative's wedding. This was simply fot use as the bride and groom's lead off to start the dancing. There were no copyright infringements as the mp3s had been purchased legally by the user and were being used for his own purposes in a none commercial situation. The hired DJ was a fully performing rights registered, and paid monthly dues commensurate with the recorde paid.

All I did was loaded them into Producer 8 and edited them into a continuous dance spot for the person that purchased them. No commercial situation existed. Simplya favour to a freind. I had no idea of the source of the files at the time, they were given to me on a stick and passed all virus tests.

What happened was the moment I tried to save the master file, SONAR froze, and a spurious message popped up telling me to format my hard disk before I could use it (as f*****g if!). As it happens I did not fall for that one.Further all coms to my MOTU interface were severed and the messhge said "turned off or disconnected". Ib fact, the MOTU was on and workjing fine. To cut a long story short, after re-installing drivers and re-configuring ad nauseum, I have only partiall functionality. The hard disc in use at the time (external Seagate drive) works fine on my business PCs but is denied access when connected to the DAW. As all my project files are on it, I am in deep sh1t!

It seems to me that I have been the victim of a paranoic iTunes anti piracy protection system. It appears that the files contain some sort of bomb, and indescriminately trash the system in use. I am having the files analysed, and I intend to take legal action to recover my losses. I am in England, and English laws prevail.

I repeat, the files were legally purchsed in England from the UK iTunes site and were being used within the provisions of UK copyright law by the user for his own purposes without gain. There was no distribution and the files were being played back at a private function for his own pleasure. Whatever Apple might think, if these file contain destructive malware, then they are in contravention of UK law (and international) and they are culpable and will pay.

has anyone else innocently fallen foul of this apparently unacceptable and illegal iTunes activity (such activity still subject to confirmation)?

I don't understand what you did. If you don't mind, could you spell out the steps in a sequential order without the wedding story?  What I just typed could come off as a little rude. I don't mean it to be.  

I thought iTunes files were AAC?

Also, didn't Apple ditch copy protection?

Me thinks there was more on that stick than he knows. Never put an un-scanned drive into your DAW or any other computer for that matter. Your buddy had something nasty on his drive. And I ain't talking about the music.

I agree with the others. iTunes has got nothing to do with this. My daughter bought a memory card for his camera during a trip in Asia. She bought it in a big, respectable looking warehouse/store . There was a trojan virus  planted in the card. TGGhe package and everyhing was just like a normal Kingston.

Addition: You can get the project files from the Seagate by copying them to another drive using the other PC. Then you can format the Seagate and continue using it, if a malware removal does not work.

Sorry, I forget to add, that after a big re-installing session I got things up and running again (other than the external drive).

I re-created the project as a sort of working backwards investigation. This time it saved the file without a problem. I reloaded it, and got the message "corrupted audio. This will be replaced with silence". The project completed loading and where the sound clip peaks should have been there was a "replaced with silence notification". This would seem to be a classic piracy protection event. Further attempts to do anything with the file resulted in SONAR freezing.

Cheers  

The AVG hit was probably a false positive, which is not unusual. AVG is just looking for strings of values that match the signature of known viruses. In a data file that contains many millions of more-or-less random values, you're bound to occasionally you get a match but it's just coincidence.

MP3s are data files, not executables, and though they could conceivably provide a transport mechanism for malware, they'd have no way to execute it.

The "corrupted audio" message is misleading. All it means is that you have replaced the original audio with a new file. I see this all the time in my mastering projects, which reference external files that are independently updated.