Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

iCommune for iTunes Shares Over Network

Posted by pudge on from the sweeeeet dept.

James G. Speth writes "I just released a free public beta of iCommune, a plug-in for iTunes that enables music sharing over the network. Your friends' music libraries appear in the iTunes source list. You can browse their collections, and choose to download or stream their music. It also allows you to make your own music library available to others." It's a bit buggy, but it is a beta. It shows a lot of promise. It also comes with an indexer (in Python, though I might write my own in Perl :-) so you can share MP3s to iTunes clients outside of iTunes on the server end (such as from a Linux box, in theory).

5 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Watch out for RIAA by the+Dragonweaver · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It would be very smart to put a disclaimer with your beta saying that you do not endorse the sharing of copyrighted files without the permission of the copyright holder. It is best to be paranoid about such things because then you can distance yourself from the inevitable lawsuit.

    From my personal POV, however, this is a great thing. File-sharing has introduced me to many artists that I would otherwise never have heard of, let alone bought. Some of my favorite artists are, in fact, ones I first heard in MP3 format. If only RIAA would see what a boon such prgrams are, rather than suing the creators of such programs...

    --
    Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
  2. Didn't Stebe Demo this? by pauljlucas · · Score: 5, Interesting
    At the previous MacWorld (not Jan '03), I remember Steve giving a demo where one of his VPs came on stage with a PowerBook and that PowerBook's iTunes library appeared on Steve's desktop Mac. The VP closed the lid on the PowerBook and the library disappeared. All by Rendezvous. And yet I've not seen or heard anything about that feature since. The current iTunes doesn't do that.

    Anybody else remember that demo? Anybody know what happened to that feature?

    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  3. Re:So where is the source? by CaptCosmic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But why does everything on Slashdot have to GNU/GPL/Open Source? If it were, there would be nothing about Apple, nothing about Microsoft, and nothing about any other commercial software. In that case, I would have even less reason to read Slashdot.

    Slashdot is supposed to be about "News For Nerds". I find this article to be intriguing. Am I going to download the software? Probably not. But that doesn't mean I don't want to know about it.

    --
    -> Capt Cosmic <-
  4. Re:Rendezvous developer question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Over at O'Reilly's there's a 2 part article about incorporating Rendezvous in Cocoa apps:
    Incorporating Rendezvous into Your Cocoa Applications, Part 1

  5. Try Edna instead? by djupedal · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Edna allows you to access your MP3 collection from any networked computer. This software streams your MP3s via HTTP to any MP3 player that supports playing off a remote connection (e.g. Winamp, FreeAmp, Sonique, XMMS)."

    A Python stand alone that will index music files and serve up dynamic pages...keeps stats too. Very nice :)