Comments on: iNapsterTunes

iNapsterTunes

mathowie — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:23:27 -0800

Musicast turns your iTunes (mac only) into a music sharing server that conveniently spits out a podcast feed for your friends to subscribe and download all your mp3s from. Download this quick before ~~the RIAA kills the server~~ something might happen to this wonderful app.

By: Robot Johnny

Robot Johnny — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:32:04 -0800

I can't see this lasting long. Apple has a habit of crippling add-ons like these in version updates.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:41:17 -0800

Can they somehow fit web2.0 and social networking into that buzzword slushpile?

By: Armitage Shanks

Armitage Shanks — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:48:55 -0800

It's cute, but does it do anything that the free SlimServer software doesn't?

By: illovich

illovich — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:58:14 -0800

What I don't understand with stuff like this is why iTunes has to be involved at all.

By: caddis

caddis — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:02:06 -0800

Once the app is released in the wild it can never really be suppressed.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:08:30 -0800

does it do anything that the free SlimServer software doesn't? You don't understand. This isn't for home entertainment or streaming. If I gave you my musicast URL, you could download all my music to your own computer. It's basically a small scale napster and I imagine at a university it could spread like wildfire, as people share all their mp3s with one another.

By: matimer

matimer — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:12:15 -0800

At universities people have shared network access which will explain the hundreds of gigs of music my friends have.

By: mds35

mds35 — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:12:16 -0800

This is why you're number 1.

By: TravellingDen

TravellingDen — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:13:50 -0800

It's not really an itunes plugin - it's a standalone app that reads the itunes database, which apple provides in easy to use XML format to begin with.

By: interrobang

interrobang — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:17:08 -0800

I can't visit "my Musicast"; it keeps timing out. Unless I'm missing something, here.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:20:16 -0800

open up port 5554 on your mac firewall in prefs (and be sure your home router forwards 5554 to your mac if you want outside friends to see in).

By: Armitage Shanks

Armitage Shanks — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:26:46 -0800

If I gave you my musicast URL, you could download all my music to your own computer. Sorry if I'm being dense, but how would you do that other than by selecting the songs one at a time?

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:28:26 -0800

There's a podcast feed of all the mp3s.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:31:55 -0800

This is clever. And the web interface is gorgeous. AJAX is really fast when you're running the server locally...

By: caddis

caddis — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:33:32 -0800

MAC envy

By: alms

alms — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:57:54 -0800

It looks like this does not allow you to share any DRM-protected (e.g. iTunes Music Store) music. Is that right?

By: aaronetc

aaronetc — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:21:10 -0800

Even if you could shared DRM'd files, they'd still be DRM'd.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:22:45 -0800

This is just as illegal as Napster, and they know it. From their website: Musicast is completely legal as long as you're not sharing copyrighted material. Even if you do happen to be sharing stuff you aren't supposed to be, Mr. RIAA would have to guess your IP address to even find your Musicast to see your huge stash of copyrighted music.

By: grobstein

grobstein — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:28:12 -0800

It's probably just my browser settings, but I nonetheless find it ironic that I can't open the "Legal" link on their site.

By: bob sarabia

bob sarabia — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:31:29 -0800

Who's ever let DRM get in there way before?

By: dhammond

dhammond — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:56:57 -0800

Even if you do happen to be sharing stuff you aren't supposed to be, Mr. RIAA would have to guess your IP address to even find your Musicast to see your huge stash of copyrighted music. I can envision that one sentence alone causing huge nightmares for their legal department. I'm not a lawyer, but something similar is ultimately what brought Napster down, if I remember correctly.

By: persona non grata

persona non grata — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:59:12 -0800

I've got it and I am just wondering how to best use it once I get a free serial. ;-)

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:03:20 -0800

does it do anything that the free SlimServer software doesn't? You don't understand. This isn't for home entertainment or streaming. To rephrase: does it do anything that the free Apache doesn't?

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:20:44 -0800

This is pretty fucking sweet.

By: oraknabo

oraknabo — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:23:30 -0800

I suppose this could be done with a WASTE network too, just not as easily.

By: strawberryviagra

strawberryviagra — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:38:01 -0800

So - what's the address to your MP3 stash Matt?

By: The Card Cheat

The Card Cheat — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:00:35 -0800

Only for OS X 10.4, you say? Pity. Looks like it's back to wax cylinders for me!

By: strawberryviagra

strawberryviagra — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:09:00 -0800

It works - check it out

By: nanojath

nanojath — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:17:41 -0800

I can envision that one sentence alone causing huge nightmares for their legal department. They really ought to wise up and change that wording - the difference from Napster is that they are not directly facilitating the actual copyright violation - the user, by instructing the software to construct 'casts of copyright protected files, does that. Napster actually facilitated the violation of copyright directly, by providing the interface through which people actually sought and found infringing shared files. This gave them a knowledge that infringement was occurring and some capacity to put a stop to it - which I think were critical components of why they were found in violation of the DMCA For this software they are much more solidly rooted in the position that they are merely providing a tool which are merely capable of being used for infringement (my modem, my computer, my gmail account are just as capable though not half so slick). But they would be better off to be more judicious, and pay more lip service, to respecting copyright.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:36:16 -0800

They could be held liable under the Grokster case, which held that "one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

By: cobra libre

cobra libre — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 23:20:56 -0800

There's a lot to like about this, but I wonder if they could build in some meaningful access controls for the next version. Their current idea of "access control" apparently involves displaying a list of every contact in your address book to anybody who happens to drop by port 5554. And... that's it. No actual user accounts, no password prompts, nothing. Seriously, I have no idea what they were thinking with that feature.

By: strawberryviagra

strawberryviagra — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 23:54:15 -0800

Well - 30 people are a little more familiar with TISM. I'm going to shut it down now, in case someone starts hacking my machine.

By: muthecow

muthecow — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 05:15:01 -0800

it doesn't seem to work for me. oh well, it was fun while i downloaded it and closed the annoying pop-ups telling me to pay for it. as for the university students enjoying it to share music - most of my friends are on windows and use mytunes instead. it seems much easier to use, but then again it is doing a slightly different job. makes it easy to take songs from other people on the network. something you used to be able to do in very early versions of iTunes 4.0

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 09:44:19 -0800

Man, I guess I just don't understand how to set up my ports, because I thought this would e cool and instead I just keep getting the time out...

By: emelenjr

emelenjr — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:08:50 -0800

I can't connect to my own IP address here (work... heh) and neither can anyone else, apparently. I opened the correct port, but that didn't seem to do anything. Somebody post a screenshot of what the web page/rss feed looks like. It's weird that there are no screenshots of those two things on the Musicast site. Does this thing actually work?

By: blasdelf

blasdelf — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:13:14 -0800

Sorry mathowie, but this is pretty lame and generally unworkable IRL due to being easily crippled by NAT and just generally being a poor model for illicit music distribution. You could only ever host at most a few tens of songs – what are you going to have it do, generate a podcast feed that encloses the thousands of songs in your collection, and host all that through this app's embedded webserver? All apologies, that shit doesn't work. Also, they want people to pay for it! I doubt that this will ever come into enough use for the RIAA to ever even care enough (tens of songs!) to wipe this shit up with the inducement standard put forward in the Grokster opinion. These guys will be entirely forgotten once they scroll off the front pages of digg, boingboing, et. al. – like so much crap these days.

By: DoctorFedora

DoctorFedora — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:57:01 -0800

Well - 30 people are a little more familiar with TISM. I'm going to shut it down now, in case someone starts hacking my machine. I'm a cyber-terrorist! Just how cool is that?