ourTunes update project
p2pnet.net News:- By the second quarter of 2006 Apple had shipped more than 8 million iPods and, “on just about every college campus you’ll see people with the distinctive white headphones bobbing their heads to music,” says Justin Stanley , a college student who’s, “majored in everything from Computer Science to Philosophy” and who’s now, “just trying to graduate in under 6 years”.
He’s also worked as a part time network/systems admin for a campus office on my campus since 2002 and, “Music is a big part of my life, I listen to about 6~8 hours of it a day,” he tells p2pnet.
Where does that music come from? Here’s his take, together with a plea for help on a project to make ourTunes compatible with iTunes 7:
Some of the music comes from the iTunes music store which, says Apple, has sold more than 2 billion songs since its inception. But by far the largest portion comes from the various p2p services and networks, and downloading music and movies from them are daily activities for many college students, to the disgust of the RIAA and MPAA.
Within these huge networks lies a huge repository of music coming from every possible source that’s largely untapped. And surprisingly, it’s very simple to set iTunes to share your library over any intranet, and even easier to connect to other iTunes sharers.
But it’s not general knowledge and hopefully, this post will set that straight.
Back in 2004 ourTunes was developed to allow someone, anyone, to connect to iTunes share and download music directly to a computer. This all took place on the intranet of the college campus, completely untraceable by the RIAA.
It was developed by David Blackman, a Stanford University student, starting out as One2OhMyGod, a Swing-based client designed for iTunes’s version 4.1 authorization. It was made obsolete by Apple’s release of version 4.5.
After Australian student David Hammerton cracked the new encryption and authentication system used by iTunes, One2OhMyGod was forked into a program called AppleRecords. ourTunes was developed further from AppleRecords, including the conceptual design of programs such as MyTunes, designed by Trinity College (Connecticut) student Bill Zeller, although these programs lacked ourTunes’s searchability features.
Apple took steps to disable MyTunes in April 2004, but hasn’t taken action against ourTunes or other programs like GetTunes.
By October 2004, ourTunes had been downloaded more than 150,000 times and as of 2006, it’d been downloaded almost 350,000 times.
However, ourTunes doesn’t work with iTunes 7 or later, and no further development has taken place since the 1.3.3 release, so I’ve started a grass roots effort to “Save OurTunes” and I’m looking for donations to pay a programmer to develop the app for the latest version of iTunes.
Yesterday I contacted David Hammerton and a tentative agreement was reached for the latest version but David, being busy with other projects, needs a bit of compensation for this monumental effort. This is the first and biggest step in having a working ourTunes!
Visit SaveOurTunes.com for ways to help! Obviously, if you’re a developer interested in helping, contact me at saveourtunes [at] gmail [dot] com.
Stanley says he needs $1,000 and so far, $250 has been donated.
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