My take on this was a bit different when I read it. Apple changed the format of a file that they consider an internal detail of their iPod implementation. Certain 3rd party tools depend on the reverse-engineering job that they had done on that file. They're now broken pending an update of that reverse engineering job.

It doesn't smell like any more of an attempt to lock people out than the original decision to use a proprietary database format did. This just looks like a hash, so it should not be a much more difficult matter to figure out what's being hashed and update the 3rd party code to hash the same value and insert the hash the same way Apple does. After all, the database format had to be reverse engineered in the first place.

Hell, maybe I'll see if I have one of these files myself and give it a crack. I'll be astonished if this withstands a few hours' effort from someone who isn't afraid of hash primitives :)