@steve_m wrote:
I’m not a programmer, so please try not to talk over my head. I had the idea to create something where a group of 5 or 6 friends and I, who live all over the world, can share our iTunes libraries with each other. The ideal, perfect world scenario would be some kind of web-based iTunes that we could all access and load music (and maybe movies) onto our iPods from. I don’t know if anything remotely resembling this is possible (or legal), but that’s what I’m hoping for. I did a lot of searching around and came across daapd, downloaded it, and from there had no idea what to do because I don’t know anything about programming and I need things spelled out for me a little better, in language I understand. I found my way here via one of the readme files that came with it.
Am I on the right track? I’m pretty good at figuring this stuff out as I go, but I’m not going to become a programmer overnight, and even if I did have the time to devote to it, it would take awhile.
I have a hosting account on a Linux server with unlimited space, if that helps.
IANAL, so I won’t touch the legal aspect of it.
Apple makes it difficult to do this sort of thing. the iPod will only sync from locally connected music stores. So as the poster mentioned, you’d have to fake iTunes out by mounting a drive and having that be your main iTunes library, and then syncing from that.
That might work, except for other problems — it’s *sloooow*. Whenever you rip an album or something, it has to copy that data up to the network share. I find that on a 100Mb connection, I don’t like having a remote mounted library because of performance. I tried it over webdav once, and just loading the library was painful.
The other thing is that you can’t really share the library with multiple people, either (AFAIK) — I think the backend is now db-based, but there is still contention on writes, and probably will have much more contention issues when multiple people are using the central repository.
It might be that if that isn’t the library you use day-to-day, but just for sharing and synching ocassionally, it might work for that purpose, though.
Worth a shot.
Other than that, you’d be looking at doing a web-based music jukebox, like webjuke or zina or something.
— Ron