Mac P2P Music Sharing with iTunes is Online 261
kraksmoka writes "Spymac.com has already found a way to take the new features of iTunes 4 to new heights. Today they opened up a new section on their site entitled Spymac Music, which is a database of shared iTunes libraries. Anyone who wants can submit their music library to be shared. Currently it sports a search engine capable of searching title, album and artist. " I wonder how long this will last.
As it was intended... (Score:5, Informative)
Why this won't live longin the public as is (Score:5, Informative)
I did try some other sites listed in those posts and I have to say that this is balancing on the dangerous zone. I could see the RIAA going after this specifically for that fact that there is little difference (if any), as far as they're concerned, with users 'broadcasting' stuff via iTunes vs. any other streamer.
I will not be suprised to see a few things happen:
1. all these public iTunes sharing sites will be shut down (or at least the biggest ones) via RIAA court orders
2. most of these public iTunes sites will simply turn off due to bandwidth limitations
3. Apple with either disable this feature in an update or publicly state that it is not meant for public sharing. Or some statement to that affect
That said, coupled with Rendezvous on a local lan, this is a pretty kick ass feature.
sahreitunes.com (Score:5, Informative)
www.shareitunes.com [shareitunes.com]
READ!!! Read the site! (Score:5, Informative)
This is not P2P file sharing, it's not piracy, and it has already been discussed to death in the media over the past 2 weeks.
Re:As it was intended... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a chance to see what other people like, and maybe find something new to you.
Re:Propaganda (Score:3, Informative)
Re:they are asking for it (Score:5, Informative)
Either to engage in, or to defend, litigation a large corporation would generally engage a law firm specialising in litigation, and probably one specialising in the particular type of litigation - employment, competition, IP, environmental, etc.
So the question should be "how big is apple's legal budget?".
Re:Bad Karma (Score:1, Informative)
Most cable and DSL links have an upload speed cap of 20 to 30 k Bytes per second (kBps), not k bits per second (kbps). A single MP3 encoded at 128 kbps should fit through the pipe just fine.
Re:READ!!! Read the site! (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes does limit the number of clients that can connect (to 5 I believe), so I imagine this has already been taken into consideration. I find it hard to imagine that streaming between two arbitrary IP addresses (rather than just the local subnet) would get into a product as significant as iTunes now is for Apple if they weren't 100% sure that the record industry was OK with it.
I suspect the client limit was specifically to turn this from a "internet radio" situation into "play your CDs to a couple of your friends, just as if they'd come over to your house".
It took about 5 minutes after iTunes was released to people start sharing stuff across the net, and about 10 minutes before people were writing apps/php scripts to list active servers, so this has to have been cleared beforehand.
Re:Apple promoting piracy? (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite - the discovery of servers on the local net is done with Rendezvous, but you can "share" (i.e., stream) music between any two IP addresses (if you're behind a firewall, you need to open port 3689 [macwrite.com]).
You can NOT copy the files (Score:5, Informative)
You can't copy this files. It's streaming. It's not sharing in the sense of sharing files, it's sharing in the sense of sharing music that can be listened to only while the person sharing is online.
You can NOT copy the files.
Got it? You're not sharing files, you're sharing a playlist of streamable music, that's it. Person turns off sharing or goes offline, you can't play them. You can't copy them to your local disk. You just can't.
You can NOT copy the files.
So please do a little research before you jump all over this as music piracy. It's not a bug, it's a feature that Apple has proudly advertised.
Re:Apple promoting piracy? (Score:2, Informative)
Rendezvous is only for discovery - it essentially tells everyone on the local network "there's a service X running on this machine" (in this case DAAP). That doesn't stop others connecting, they just don't get the convienient discovery.
This is not illegal in the US (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes Music Sharing is limited to five concurrent clients, whether using Rendezvous or IP. I believe that this means it is exempt from the RIAA webcasting restrictions.
Tools such as Audio Hijack will allow you to record the audio stream to an AIFF in real time, but this isn't Apple's problem. Audio Hijack has many other legitimate uses.
Do
Think before posting
Re:You can NOT copy the files (Score:2, Informative)
Well, with a product like Audio Hijack [rogueamoeba.com], it's trivially easy to capture the streamed audio and make your own file. /p>
As other posters have noted, it's clear that this feature was intended for people to share among their family and friends, not to let the whole world listen to (and, using something like Audio Hijack, copy) someone's iTunes library.
Why do people feel the need to do things like this anyway?
OH YES YOU CAN!!! (Score:5, Informative)
then yes you can dl the mp3's directly from iTunes
its basic but works ok and creates fully tagged mp3s
queue up files
google for "itunesdl" or "itdlgui"
anyone who thinks that you cant ALREADY do this with iTunes
for testing purposes only
[wink][tongue]
Anyone actually read the iTunes license? (Score:4, Informative)
However, it appears that the library sharing feature is legal. And there is precedent -- Microsoft's ThreeDegrees has a similar feature.
iTunes streaming does not appear to fall under the "webcasting" laws/tariffs as the potential audience is limited, it is not live, and the client has the full ability to browse the contents of the server.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, this is not a hole in Apple's software. It is an advertised feature. If you want to blame someone, blame Apple, not the people using their software in a way it was designed to be used.
Re:Apple promoting piracy? (Score:3, Informative)
and the software is only $8
Re:You can NOT copy the files (Score:5, Informative)
I stick by my statement, "you can not copy the files", but I'd better modify it because everyone's missing the point. "You can copy the data, but you can't use iTunes to easily copy the files to your disk without jumping through some third party hoops." There, happy?
You can use all sorts of hacks and workarounds and custom tools copy the stream and save it to your disk. But in all those cases you're working around the existing implementation.
If I don't have a deadbolt on my door, just a handle lock, am I giving you permission to enter my home without asking me? You can come in a window, or jimmy the lock, or slide down the chimney, it doesn't matter, you're still breaking the law. The point is, Apple is not giving you an easy way to copy the files. If you want to break the law, you have to go out of your way to do it.
Sheesh, nitpicky people.
iTunes- The illegial copying program? (Score:3, Informative)
The files are streamed as standard mp3 files, over http. Because of this, you can capture them, just as you can capture a "mp3 radio" station.
Using ngrep [packetfactory.net] (which compiles cleanly on OSX), you can watch the network traffic.
File order (ie, the XXX.mp3) appears to be keyed on Date-Added. If you add the Date added field to itunes, and then stream the files, you can see they continue almost sequencially.
The ID of the music is continuing (XXX.mp3) is continuing, nearly sequencially.
One thing to note is that in some cases, this order might be screwed up slightly. This is because if a song is deleted from the user's libraby, it appears to keep it's number reserved.
The other thing that can screw the order up is songs that were batch-imported in the same minute. It seems that iTunes only tracks down to the minute, so the order within that minute is arbitrary, as far as I can tell.
If, after determining the URL via ngrep, and taking the IP, you retrieve it using curl (or wget), you add it to iTunes, it retains the id3 information.
ie- wget "http://192.168.1.102:3689/databases/35/items/311
It would be an interesting test to see if iTunes is adding information to the file before streaming it. (for identification, as Pudge suggested)
This would be possible by doing a binary diff on the two files. I don't have two macs with iTunes 4 installed (yet!, but I intend to install iTunes on the others soon), so I can't test this theory. Any volunteers?
(Side note- It would be trivial to write a perl script that parsed the ngrep output, and fed it into wget automatically, to download any songs you double-click.
[similiar to http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/ ]
You wouldn't even need to listen to the entire song. Just start it playing, and iTunes will finish for you. I won't post mine, for reasons below.)
Side note redux-
Apple may have inadvertantly created a file-sharing utility rivaling Napster/Kazaa. This creates an interesting legal issue. This creates an interesting legal issue. Keep in mind that a student was recently sued for creating a software device that searched Network shares for mp3 files.
Given the RIAA's stance towards piracy, and that they want to work with apple, I suspect they would sue whomever wrote the 4 line perl script, rather than Apple. They are also likely to ask "index" sites like spymac to shut down, and send a cease-and-desist, or a lawsuit..
I sure hope this Anonymous Coward thing works. I don't want to be sued today. I've done enough other questionable things.
-Crutz
Re:Apple promoting piracy? (Score:2, Informative)
None of them are going to be able to serve more than five streams at one time. iTunes will only accept five connections at once.
So this is actually a very small-scale thing, not "mass-redistribution of music to anonymous strangers" at all.
Re:This is not new its shoutcast/icecast but for M (Score:2, Informative)
iTunes is well aware of Shoutcast and even has a built-in Radio section that organizes Shoutcast stations.
Re:iTunes- The illegial copying program? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:iTunes- The illegial copying program? (Score:2, Informative)
for example:
wget 10.0.0.1:3689/login
The session id is coded into the four last bytes
wget 10.0.0.1:3689/databases?session-id=1234
The bd-id is encoded into the bytes after "miid"
wget 10.0.0.1:3689/databases/32/items?session-id=1234
wget 10.0.0.1:3689/databases/32/items/12.mp3?session-i
Re:Reminder: Sharing music is for personal use onl (Score:3, Informative)
It says Remote access of copyrighted music is only provided for personal use or as otherwise legally permitted use only or when otherwise permitted by the law.
Re:Simply Incorrect (Score:3, Informative)
http://your.mac.com:3689/somestuff/file.mp3
However, if you want to learn more, go to these two places:
pudge's journal [perl.org]
DAAP reverse-engineering project [sourceforge.net]
A DAAP Wiki (collaborative webpage) [deleet.de]
Briefly:
To just piggyback on iTunes:
Use tcpdump to watch for URLs of the form http://the.ip.address:3689/databases/32/233.mp3?s
Then use that URL with the web browser or download client of your choice to steal music.
To write your own client:
First you login with http://the.ip.address:3689/login
You parse the result for the session ID number
Then you do some logging in stuff
Then you ask for the contents of the iTunes database with http://the.ip.addrses:3689/databases/##/items
Th
Re:Awesome! (Score:1, Informative)