iTunes DAAP Servers
Posted by Neil Crosby on February 22, 2005 04:26 PM
I’ve been meaning to post about DAAP servers for quite a while now, and almost got around to it last month when deleet’s DAAP Project wiki picked up my “iTunes streaming now only allows five users per day” blog entry.
While most people think of iTunes as just being something that you can use on Macs or Windows machines running 2000 or XP, that isn’t completely the case - you can set up a server on, for example, a linux box which will serve music to your iTunes running Mac and Windows boxen. You see, iTunes uses Apple’s proprietary Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) to transfer music and playlists between computers, and like all good proprietary formats which gain a lot of usage various people have come along to try and understand what makes it tick.
There are various projects currently looking at understanding DAAP, such as The mt-daapd Project, deleet’s DAAPD Server, and the OpenDAAP Forum which longs for a day when DAAP becomes an open standard.
Certainly the mt-daapd project looks to be the most professional of the available projects, with an active community and current development going on. It is this project which I shall tinker with as soon as I have the time available.