2005-03-16
A Quick Meta-Post
The box that I host husk.org on was rebuilt over Christmas. You'd not have noticed, but it completely broke MT, because it couldn't read the DB files. Only two and a bit months later, I moved them to MySQL and I could actually edit things again, resulting in the post about Flame a week or so ago.
However, annoyingly, there were still a few supporting CGI scripts that didn't work, so comments, trackbacks and the like were broken until, ooh, ten minutes ago. Apologies to the two real users who probably tried to comment on Flame and the dozen or so spammers who hit a 500 Internal Server Error some time in January, when I wasn't posting anyway.
Now it's working, you'll have noticed I seem to be trying to get some thoughts about digital music (which, due to my Mac weenie nature, really means iTunes, but not, oddly, the store, which I hardly use) out into the open, possibly to be useful, but more likely to stop them marching around my brain so some other things can take hold there.
Consider yourselves warned.
2005-03-16
Streaming vs Sharing
In the last post, I referred to the fact that I don't like it when people call iTunes music sharing "streaming". There's a good reason for this.
2005-03-16
Obscure Restrictions and OurTunes DOS
It's taken a month or two for this to bubble into public consciousness, but iTunes 4.7.1 has a nasty limit on its music sharing. Previous versions of iTunes 4 limited you to five simultaneous connections to a shared library, but this has now been changed to five "different users" a day:
I'm not the first person to discover this (that may well be the author of this forum post, although Neil Crosby's writeup was the first I saw). However, it does affect me more than most, because I strongly suspect the behaviour change is entirely to try and get around the use of shared library copying applications like OurTunes and my own Blue Coconut.
Blue Coconut certainly, and the other looks probably, generate a new connection to the iTunes share. If you're copying from one machine, that used to mean that, while you were doing so, they could only share to four "real" users, but I never really felt the need to spell this out.
Additionally, OurTunes tries to connect to any share it can see. Run five copies in a big enough university network, and you've just closed down iTunes sharing for everyone.
Of course there are ways around this. You can run your own DAAP server (a topic that I'm intending to write about in more depth, but for now your magic keywords are mt-daapd, Music Publisher and accessTunes), but for most users that's not going to mean anything. On the other hand, except for colleges, I wonder how often this is a problem.
Copying from iTunes shares is also, of course, not something Apple wants to be associated with. It's surprising they changed this rather than the DAAP authentication. Mind you, oddly, this restriction will be much harder to work around than a MD5 change.
I started drafting this yesterday, and in the meantime Cory Doctorow has waded in with another of his "all DRM is bad! Apple are evil! Don't trust them!" rants. I question a lot about this, but I'll confine myself to one obvious point. I didn't pay for anything to do with iTunes. It's free, it's running on an OS that came for free with my computer, and it shares (I don't like the word streaming: another rant) songs that I didn't pay to have on my computer. Apple may be removing a feature, but it's a feature that nobody else is even close to implementing. Sure, it kind of sucks, but no more than that.
2005-03-09
Mutterings around a small Flame
Blue Coconut has been joined in this site's applications section by a little utility called Flame.
As you'll see if you visit the page, it's a little application that, like Rendezvous Browser and iRoster, allows you to see which services are being 'advertised' (made available) on your local network. However, as Tom makes clear, we look at it by machine, rather than by service. This makes sense to us, but we could be wrong. Anyway, it's free. Try it.
The fact that we're releasing this just before Etcon isn't an accident. The original idea for the application came from a comment by Matt Haughey on plasticbag.org, when discussing the paucity of iPhoto (as opposed to iTunes) shares. Looking back, we're a long way from the UI simplicity that Matt envisaged, but I think we still have a useful tool. Anyway, there's a reason the version number is a lowly 0.10.