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Free iTunes Over a Browser

Posted by michael on from the release-the-hounds dept.

Ade writes "One may now listen and search for Apple iTunes music via this front end or any webserver running the perl script called iTMS-4-ALL, which was written by Jason Rohrer, programmer of the secure filesharing system MUTE who hopes the script 'helps revive everyone's ITMS interfaces.' Music activists Downhill Battle, who organised the Grey Tuesday protests for disseminating censored music, run a copy of the script and say 'this is a cute tool, but it has the potential to become a powerful weapon to fight the major record label monopoly' in the ways they outline. Playing the music requires QuickTime for the ~600kb downloadable MP4 snippets to be heard." Update: 04/19 01:41 GMT by H : Thanks to Aaron at Punboy for sending us a link to a faster server.

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Misleading. by TitusC3v5 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Misleading title. This front end merely lets you listen to the samples, not actually download/listen to the actual purchased songs.

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    1. Re:Misleading. by Abjifyicious · · Score: 5, Informative
      DAAP is the protocol used for the LAN sharing feature of iTunes. The music store has nothing to do with it.

      In a sense though, this isn't completely new. The search interface was hacked long ago, so Apple added some encryption stuff to lock out non-iTunes clients. All that's been hacked is the encryption key.

    2. Re:Misleading. by prockcore · · Score: 5, Informative

      And now I'm wondering how long it will take before the protocol will be changed slightly to lock out this program...

      I'm the one who discovered the AES key, it took me about 4 hours. Now that I know where to look, even if they change it, it won't take long to get the new key.

      So the question is, how often does Apple want to break older versions of iTunes and force everyone to upgrade? The other question is, why would Apple want to do that in the first place?

  2. Re:should have done this by dr.badass · · Score: 5, Informative

    why didn't apple make itunes work with any browser to begin with?

    Because they were going for seamless integration with iTunes the app and the iPod. What good would it be to use a browser interface be if you had to use iTunes to play the music anyway?

    It may seem like a nice idea to use a web browser interface, but it would completely shatter the sense of integration that they were going for, and succeeded at.

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  3. Re:This could be.... by spoonboy42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Linux/BSD users already can listen to and download music shared over iTunes using TunesBrowser. The project is rather young, so a do-it-yourself compile is necessary, but it does present a very nice, clean GUI interface to iTunes shares.

    (Incidentally, if you'd RTFA, your would notice that this project actually allows you to browse samples from the iTMS store, and has nothing to do with network song sharing.)

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  4. Winamp Plays DRM'ed MP4s Just Fine by lotsofno · · Score: 5, Informative
    Playing the music requires Apple Quicktime for the ~600kb downloadable MP4 snippets to be heard.
    Actually, using an easy to install plug-in, you can listen to iTMS' proprietary DRM'ed AAC tracks in Winamp, easy.