blue coconut

This is an awesome app for Mac users.

Basically, it allows you to download music from shared libraries, which means I can download music straight from my Dad's computer, without having to ask him to burn me a CD (or even having to ask his permission:). No more wasted CD's, no more tracks burned in the wrong order (which seems to happen almost every time he burns me a CD in one way or another). Just a quick (very quick) download, and that's it. It even downloads the album art. A screenshot for you:



I'm sure there's a windows equivalent to this program, and if you can find one, see if it works. Do you know what this means??? This means you can sit in an airport or a Starbucks and download music from anyone's computer that happens to be running iTunes, as long as it's not purchased from iTunes (unfortunately, it doesn't remove the protection from Music Library files--JHYMN needs to get their act together!!). I can easily see this program put to even more illegal use, since technically the iTunes Music Store is like one big library...I think you catch my drift.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Shared Libraries on iTunes, an excerpt from Wikipedia should be sufficiently informative:

iTunes Library songs can be shared over a local network using Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) – Apple's implementation of the Zeroconf (zero configuration required) open network standard – which allows shared lists of songs within the same subnet to be automatically detected. When a song is shared, iTunes can stream the song but won't save it on the local hard drive, in order to prevent unauthorized copying. Songs in Protected AAC format can also be accessed but authentication is required. A maximum of five users may connect to a single user every 24 hours.

Originally with iTunes 4.0, users could freely access shared music anywhere over the Internet, in addition to one's own subnet, by specifying IP addresses of remote shared song libraries. Apple quickly removed this feature with version 4.0.1, claiming that users were violating the End User License Agreement.

Music sharing uses the Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP), created by Apple for this purpose.[10] DAAP has been reverse-engineered and is now used to stream playlists from non-Apple software.

To share your library and use other shared libraries, simply go to the "Sharing" tab in the iTunes preferences and select "Look for shared music" and "Share my music." Then you're set! Make sure everyone in your house does the same, that way you can share with everyone on your network. If you want to download something, all you do is select it/them, Blue Coconut shows what you've selected, and then you click the "download" button. That's it. It adds them to your Library automatically when they're done downloading.

It's a beta, so it still has a few quirks, but it gets the job done. To download Blue Coconut or read more about it, go to http://husk.org/apps/blue_coconut/beta.html.