Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Does this music sharing application already exist?

KnifeMissile · 01-20-2007, 03:20 PM

I love writing software but, unfortunately, I have a bad habit of re-inventing the wheel. So, this time, I thought I'd double check to make sure this application doesn't already exist...

I got the idea from iTunes' network share. iTunes allows clients of a LAN to share their music library with each other. However, because of certain implementation details, this is as far as the sharing goes. So, I was wondering if I could write a program to forward iTunes' network protocol across different networks so that arbitrary people can share their music across the internet using iTunes.

At first, this was going to be my project but then something occured to me. iTunes actually tries, somewhat, to protect arbitrary music copying. You can see a bit of this when you try to extract music off an iPod. When you play a song from someone else's library, across the network, the music is streamed and there's no local copy to keep and use. You couldn't load the song on your iPod, say. What can we do about this?

So, I'm thinking I might want to implement my own music player. One with a music library that can be shared across the internet. One that caches songs as they're streamed across the network so that, if you listen to the song again, it won't be sent across the network again. This will also allow you to use the song locally, like loading it into your iPod.

It sounds like a decent project and an internet search hasn't revealed anything similar but, then again, I got a lot of false positives so I'm not confident that this application doesn't already exist.

So, does this application already exist, in some form, even partially? What do people think of this idea? Comments, questions and criticisms are welcome.
Thank you...

01-20-2007, 03:20 PM	#1 (permalink)
KnifeMissile Location: Waterloo, Ontario	Does this music sharing application already exist? I love writing software but, unfortunately, I have a bad habit of re-inventing the wheel. So, this time, I thought I'd double check to make sure this application doesn't already exist... I got the idea from iTunes' network share. iTunes allows clients of a LAN to share their music library with each other. However, because of certain implementation details, this is as far as the sharing goes. So, I was wondering if I could write a program to forward iTunes' network protocol across different networks so that arbitrary people can share their music across the internet using iTunes. At first, this was going to be my project but then something occured to me. iTunes actually tries, somewhat, to protect arbitrary music copying. You can see a bit of this when you try to extract music off an iPod. When you play a song from someone else's library, across the network, the music is streamed and there's no local copy to keep and use. You couldn't load the song on your iPod, say. What can we do about this? So, I'm thinking I might want to implement my own music player. One with a music library that can be shared across the internet. One that caches songs as they're streamed across the network so that, if you listen to the song again, it won't be sent across the network again. This will also allow you to use the song locally, like loading it into your iPod. It sounds like a decent project and an internet search hasn't revealed anything similar but, then again, I got a lot of false positives so I'm not confident that this application doesn't already exist. So, does this application already exist, in some form, even partially? What do people think of this idea? Comments, questions and criticisms are welcome. Thank you...