Music Discussions

iTunes runs under Wine, albeit rather slowly. I can attest to this as I have personally installed in on the Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit partition on my office computer using the newest stable version of Wine. I have not tried the store, but DAAP (the protocol that allows iTunes to share music with other computers) works flawlessly. Music plays without skipping or lag, but scrolling through your library can take an exceedingly long time.

With iTunes 6, it did not matter if a user had iTunes or some other program such as Rhythmbox, Amarok, or Banshee as they all used the same version of DAAP. However, with iTunes 7, Apple *broke their DAAP support to only allow other iTunes 7 clients to connect to the share. iTunes would still connect to the older style DAAP shares, but no other software could connect to it. So far, it seems that no one has found a way to make other software work with the DAAP shares hosted by iTunes 7.

This is annoying as Apple claims to be about being user-friendly and trendy, yet they keep other trendy (Linux users, BSD users other than OS X, etc.) from sharing music with their product. Worse, they do not even provide a version of iTunes for these operating systems. Basically what Apple is saying by this is that they intend to break interoperability between themselves and the software used by many others and will not provide their software as an “upgrade”.

At least when Microsoft breaks interoperability they try to sell you their product so that you can communicate with users of their product. Apple will not even take this shady step for Linux, BSD, etc. users. It seems to me that Apple fears Linux more than Microsoft since they do provide an iTunes client for Windows.

I support oss/free software and use Rhythmbox under Linux at home; however, since most of my day is spent using Windows at work I use iTunes. I realize that there are a myriad of other programs for Windows – including oss offerings – but I naively expect Apple to realize the error of their ways and support open standards.

If you are in control of your own network, I would suggest putting all of your music in an older style DAAP share on a media server, and then you can connect to it using numerous applications from within almost any operating system. If you do not control the network to which your computer is connected, many people are sharing music through iTunes, and you use Linux, at least you can run iTunes under Wine.

* I realize that this is a “feature” and is not broken, I just prefer to give Apple the benefit of the doubt and pretend it is a bug that the will eventually fix.