Don’t know what I’m doing; please help or tell me where 2 go

[Anonymous]

Sorry — I don’t know if I’m in the right place or even on the right track. I’m hoping someone will be nice enough to tell me one way or the other, and maybe point me in the right direction.

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.

[The Computer Audiophile]

I think this is likely illegal and not much different from many p2p file sharing programs, just a smaller scale. If you own the IP rights to the music then you are free to do whatever obviously.

Other than that you should be able to test this pretty easily by copying some music to your hosted site and mapping a drive to the folder that contains the music. Then point iTunes to that location for the library. A web interface is possible for iTunes and there are existing programs to do this already.

Certainly no usability guarantees from me on this idea, but it is innovative.

Let me know what else you come up wit and how this turns out. I am really interested n the results, not necessarily doing this for myself.

[rpedde]

@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

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the ideas. Mapping a drive makes sense, with the only issue being half of us are on Macs and half are on PCs, so I’m waiting to find out from the Mac users if they can do it or not. It looks like I can do it with NetDrive, but so far I can only get it to access files that are already uploaded to the server, not upload any new ones.

I’m thinking about just making it so everyone has to upload music with an ftp client, but they can browse and listen with a juke box and then decide if they want to go back into ftp to download something.

The other issue is that when we all upload our iTunes libraries, a lot of stuff is going to be repeated — I’ll have a lot of the same stuff as someone else, and there’s potential that we’d end up with thousands of identical files; it doesn’t really matter, since I have unlimited space, but it would be nice to eliminate that issue just for the sake of having things a bit tidier and more efficient. Have to think about that one a bit.

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