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iTunes Internet Sharing Restored With Third-Party App
Suppafly writes "As reported at boingboing, iCommune creator Jim Speth whipped up a little application called 401(ok) that combines a few hacks to restore internet-wide sharing to iTunes 4.0.1. You can download the app from SF.net." As one might expect, it is basically a port redirector.
Yes, several things - the interface corruption bug that happened when going back to a playlist from the iTMS when a sample was playing, the sound limiter problem that was flattening out audio and making many songs sound crappy, just to name two. A worthwile update, except for the internet sharing cutoff. But that was good too, in a way, as a gesture to the labels.
iCommune has been rewritten so as not to conflict with Apple's IP. It is available once again...
http://icommune.sourceforge.net/
http://www.versiontracker.com/
While I think that Apple was probably very aware of how iTunes 4.0's wide-area playlist streaming was viewed by the RIAA, etc., they also had other reasons to release iTunes 4.0.1 to limit the broadcast range of the program.
First of all, the documentation for 4.0 specifically had said that it was local sharing only, which seems to me to mean that they intended it to be that way from the start.
Add to that the fact that they have received bug reports about the wide-area broadcast from companies whose employees were streaming music from their home. (Repeating second-hand, but I might be able to dig up the original report I read of this.) For the companies, this was a bug, as many have to pay for the bandwidth used by their employees, and streaming music does use up a fair amount of bandwidth.
Finally, realize that the reason that the streams were being wide-area broadcast was, if I remember correctly, forgetting to set a field in the data packets sent out. A very simple fix, and they have fixed a bug, made corporate administrators happy, and not coincindentally, reassured the music industry that they are on top of these things.
Now, who knows what they will do about this new development? My guess is that they will do nothing, recognizing that, as you say, copyright protection can be an unending waste of human resource. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the next release, for whatever needs fixing/updating, just "accidentally" renders this inoperative. Then an update to this program will be made, and Apple will probably go along ignoring it as usual.
There sure is: I couldn't for the life of me get the local area network sharing to work in 4.0 on the University network. I just assumed it was being blocked somewhere down the line.
But, when me and a couple of others upgraded, the Rendezvous sharing kicked in and worked first time. Now I can share tunes from all my friends around campus, without fear of being attacked by the RIAA.
Although as I live in the UK, that is probably a little unlikely anyway. : )
There was absolutely no consumer-based reason t upgrade to 4.0.1, other than to appease the record labels.
Wrong. Not just a little bit wrong. Completely wrong.
1. The sound enhancer bug was serious. Turning on the feature basically made your shiny, new AAC's sound like hammered shit. And leaving it off was bad for people with average or below-average speakers.
2. The AAC encoder was hard-coded to use the "fast" setting, when it was supposed to be hard-coded to use "best." As a result, AAC's encoded with iTunes 4 don't sound nearly as good as they should have.
3. A variety of issues existed regarding ITMS and firewalls. These have been fixed.
4. Internet music sharing was never actually supposed to be possible. According to the documentation, it was supposed to be limited to the local network segment, either via Rendezvous discovery or via direct connection. The fact that you could share music over the Internet was a bug, not a feature.
I think they may have snuck in some minor networking fixes, but overall the motives were quite... arbitrary.
No, the motives were quite specific and concrete. "We screwed up, and people are using iTunes for music piracy. That's the ONE thing we won't stand for. Fix it! Now!"
1. The sound enhancer bug was serious. Turning on the feature basically made your shiny, new AAC's sound like hammered shit. And leaving it off was bad for people with average or below-average speakers.
Actually, comparing waveforms of pre-iTunes 4.0.1 AACs and 4.0 AAC from the same source material prove that the encoder is identical, when recorded at 96, stereo, velocity enabled.
Go home troll!
It seems the only legit reason people want internet streaming is to listen to their own collections away from their main computer. But you don't need iTunes 4.0 to do that, there is more than one way to do this that doesn't require Apple making it kick-in-the-face easy for you. Turn on personal file sharing, copy your iTunes database over to the other cpu to get playlists etc and taa-daa, you can stream. Well, there are a few other steps to take, but really just figure it out on your own, it's not that hard.
Okay, would you and the others spreading this myth cool it? I'm getting sick of seeing it.
iCommune (in its original form) was in violation of the license the author signed in good faith in order to use the API he had used in creating the product.
Apple hasn't even given a second glance to the new version of iCommune. Why? It doesn't use the iTunes API or fall under its license.
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