blyberg.net » Sharing Music with iTunes and mt-daapd

In honor of today’s launch of iTunes 7…

I’ve been floating this idea for while, and I thought I’d sketch it out here on the off-chance that someone might run with it.

I think it’s safe to say that iTunes is a fairly ubiquitous application. Versions exist for both Mac and Windows operating systems. It’s free to download, and all things considered, it’s a very nice piece of software. I can also fire up iTunes at any time during the day at work and I’ll almost always see several other users’ shared libraries on our wireless network. I’ve even had people listen to my shared library. This begs the question, why aren’t we sharing an iTunes library at our, um, library?

The problem is that we could definitely create an iTunes share on a computer somewhere, but we would soon run in to disk-space issues and other complications such as always having to be logged in with iTunes running in order for the service to be active. Well, I’ve been using a very cool piece of open-source software for a while that solves this. It’s called mt-dappd. It’s basically an iTunes server that runs as a daemon in Linux. It has a number of nice features, including playlist support. It would be quite easy to set up a new server with a terabyte or two of storage, and have your technical services department start importing new CDs as they come in (tech-serv. people are going to kill me, I know). Of course, they don’t have to import every CD they get, maybe the more popular ones–that’s up to your library.

Once your tech services folks are done importing a batch of CDs, they could be given an rsync script that syncs the new material to the dappd server. I’ve experimented with this a bit and use the following command to do it for my iTunes library:

rsync -zrptL --delete-after --progress -e "ssh" --include=core --include=tags --exclude=.DS_Store --cvs-exclude "/Users/TechSrv/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/" root@dappd.mylibrary.org:/path/to/itunes/volume/

If you’ve set the rescan_interval option in your mt-daapd.conf file, the running mt-daapd daemon will automatically re-scan the file system for changes. The result is that you’ve got a system for sharing music that requires little or no intervention after the initial setup. Because mt-dappd allows you to specify multiple locations for music files, you could simply change your rsync script to point to another directory once the tech services computer fills up with music.

This seems to me to be an easy way to provide low-barrier access to content on your existing guest and wifi networks. It also doesn’t require the material to be on the premises. In addition, If your library produces podcasts, the playlist feature would be a great way to showcase those.

I’d love to hear if anyone does something like this.

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11 Comments so far

I’ve thought about it here but we have quite a few subnets. I believe iTunes changed so that it would only look for shares on the current subnet. Have you noticed server-side workarounds?

Isn’t there a limit to the number of users who can connect to an iTunes shared library? At my college, I always get “The shared music library ‘[name of library]’ accepts only five different users each day. Please try again later.” It was my understanding that this was hard-wired into iTunes to placate labels’ fears of freeloaders.

But perhaps I am mistaken, or perhaps mt-dappd gets around this problem?

Eby, iTunes uses rendezvous to share music with other users on the same subnet. Rendezvous is not a routable protocol, so you’re correct, users need to be on the same subnet. In most library situations, one subnet is all that is used, but in a larger organization like EMU, you’re quite right–there could be a number of subnets used for guest access. In this case, I would create a separate VLAN interface for each subnet on my linux box and enable mt-daapd on each of those interfaces. My guess is that in a campus as large as EMU, the switches are VLAN capable–you’ll just need to get that server’s port tagged accordingly.

Steve, you’re correct about iTunes throwing that error, but mt-daapd does not, though I think you can configure the number of simultaneous users and unique users per day if you wish–I’ll check on this.

Eby, After adding the last comment, I found this:
http://wiki.mt-daapd.org/wiki/SSH_Tunnel

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Actually, Union College’s library was sharing their music via iTunes. I read about it on librarian.net a few months back, but I can’t find any indication on their webpage that they’re still offering this service today.

I was really excited by this idea when I read about it, but I couldn’t find a way for MFPOW to get around paying (what I assume would be steep, since you’re apparently both performing and distributing the copyrighted works) licensing fees.

The RIAA website suggests a voluntary license would be required for this kind of usage (I think this falls into the “Internet jukebox” category, as they describe it on that page).

I also don’t think this would fall under the category of fair use. Although clearly this kind of sharing would be for noncommercial purposes, it doesn’t seem to meet the other criteria.

I disagree that this would fall under the category of internet jukebox. This service would be provided on-premises, not streamed over the internet.

In regards to fair use, if we were to provide this service, we would be doing the same thing millions of iTunes users are already doing: providing guest access to a music collection. The nature of iTunes actually prevents other users from copying the data–a significant barrier to those who might otherwise borrow and rip the CD anyway. Looking at the fair use FAQ you linked to, I don’t see anything in there that seems to suggest that doing this would violate its basic elements.

Is there a legal difference between a library that purchases music CDs legally and rips them to share via iTunes and an individual who does the same? (I don’t know, I’m asking) The only difference I can think of is that a library’s shared library could be significantly larger, but when has there ever been a cap on how much of your own music you can store?

I can see how it might not sit well with the folks at RIAA, but I doubt they would have the justification to shut the service down. I doubt they’d pay much notice anyway.

I think there would be a legal difference between a library that purchases CDs legally and rips them to share via iTunes and an individual who does the same. Not because of the size of their music collection, but because of the nature and number of people that are reached.

From what I understand, webcasting (and I’m including iTunes sharing) counts as public performance of a copyrighted work. I think the reason that we can get away with sharing our music over iTunes on private networks is because there’s the assumption we’re sharing it privately, with a small group of people. It’s a “performance” of the copyrighted work, but not a public one.

According to copyright law, a performance becomes public when one performs or displays “it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered” - and I think libraries would qualify under both criteria there.

You could very well be correct–I’m certainly no lawyer, but I don’t think this particular situation falls into any pre-existing clause, simply because it hasn’t been discussed or considered.

That said, if I were a particularly courageous administrator, I would charge ahead with something like this and see if the cease and desist letters come in. I highly doubt they would.

But ultimately, this points us down a road we’re going to have to tread at some point–that is, what “special” privileges should we enjoy given our role in society. I, for one, believe that we should be given the leeway to provide and distribute digital content in a reasonably useful manner. This means that certain barriers that exist for private users should not be there for us.

That, of course, takes a committed lobbying effort from the more influential members of our leadership.

[…] John Blyberg talks about how libraries can share music via iTunes and an open-source app called mt-dappd. […]

[…] A belated nod to Paul Miller at Talis for linking my entry in the mashup competition to Apple’s new version of Itunes (for some reason, I only end up reading these posts once they show up in my Wordpress dashboard). I’m quite possibly the only person in the world who found it funny. As mentioned previously, my implementation was swiped from Coverflow to begin with which Apple has now incorporated.Competition winner John Blyberg (congrats again John!) also posted recently on the idea of libraries ripping their cd collections and sharing them within their facilities using Itunes. Seems like a great idea although I am still unsure on the copyright implications.Michael Stephens also pointed out that Cherry Hill Public Library in New Jersey is already doing something like this. Very cool. […]

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