Feature Focus: iTunes Sharing

Of all the software released over the last few years, nothing has had more impact than iTunes, besides maybe Firefox. iTunes does an amazing job doing the impossible. Storing your 40 gig music library and presenting it to you in a usable way. From smart playlists to live searching, iTunes is pretty powerful.

One of its greatest features is its capability to share an entire music library to another copy of iTunes over the network. Fortunately for us, Apple has used an open format, DAAP, to achieve this. One of the beauties of an open format is the ability for anyone to use it, and thats just what a contributor to the Xbmc development team did.


Xbmc has the ability to browse your entire music library as served to it by iTunes. And even better, it has access to those playlists you've made. This is great, because you can make up a playlist on your computer, where its faster to create, and then access it via Xbmc.

Setting it up is trivial. You just need to add a bookmark in your XboxMediaCenter.xml file within the music section. Use my entry as an example.

<bookmark>
  <name>Jon's iTunes</name>
  <path>daap://192.168.1.66</path>
</bookmark>

Just add the ip address of the computer with iTunes on it. You can have multiple shares for each computer in your house. For example, I have "Jon's iTunes" and "Steph's iTunes" on my Xbmc. Now, navigate to your music section of Xbmc and voila! Your entire iTunes library is now available within your Xbmc.



What you see is a long list of all of your playlists. If you want to navigate your entire music library, browse to the name your iTunes is sharing as. My iTunes identifies itself as "Jon Maddox's iTunes". You can see it in the picture.

You might be asking your self, "But wait?! There has to be a catch!" Well, there is kind of. Xbmc will not be able to decode or play your iTunes Music Store purchases. They're encrypted with Fairplay DRM. There used to many ways and sources to break your music out of this DRM, but since iTunes 6.0's release, all of the methods have been broken. Stay tuned though, it will be broken once again.

iTunes is the kind of application that really shows us the power we have with digital media. Gone are the days of keeping track of CDs. With iTunes, you can simply make a playlist of your favorite tracks and listen to them at your computer, or burn them out to a CD to bring to a friends house, or sync it to your iPod for your road trip, or access it via Xbmc for your party. Those who dismiss this as not being a revolution are severely unenlightened.