audio

04/19/2004, 3:40pm, EDT

Monday, April 19th

Downhill Battle: Browse iTunes via the Web

Downhill Battle notes that Jason Rohrer, programmer of the secure filesharing system MUTE and the Downhill Battle Peer-to-Peer Legal Defense Fund has created a script that can search the iTunes Music Store via the Web: "Right now this is a cute tool, but it has the potential to become a powerful weapon to fight the major record label monopoly. Here are some ways to make iTMS-4-ALL both more entertaining and more useful." The website notes that that users could "dress the interface up" with prettier CSS tags, add more functions to browse by artist, genre, etc. using the iTunes XML, extract more "copyright" info from the XML, adding song previews to file sharing clients, or to develop a more visually-oriented interface for p2p systems.

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vallette

Big deal

04/19, 4:18pm, EDT

So you can search the iTMS, BFD. You can't buy anything, no additional information, the previews loaded as text in Safari. How exactly is this going to become a 'powerful weapon' to fight the record monopoly? I really wish Downhill Bnattle would take all their over-blown rhetoric and just go away.

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finknottle

Re: Big Deal

04/19, 4:29pm, EDT

At least they are making some kind of effort to fight RIAA thuggery! Sitting there and moaning really helps.

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testudo

Re: Big Deal

04/19, 4:45pm, EDT

How are they fighting the RIAA thuggery? By determining who owns a copyright so they can say "This is owned by Sony, so I'll steal it rather than pay them money". That's not fighting.

Oh, and notice how they aren't saying "We should build a nice interface for P2P systems", they're saying "Let's steal all this info from Apple that they've spent time to produce, including their bandwidth and 30 second previews, and use them for our own nefarious purposes."

Oh, they like to put stickers on CDs in stores. What nice people. I'm sure it really helps.

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Deal

04/19, 8:12pm, EDT

Stupidity in action

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Joined Apr 2001

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JasonQG

Good for Linux folks

04/19, 9:30pm, EDT

...since they can't get iTunes. Before iTunes for Windows, this would have been handy for me. There were a couple times when I was at my Windows machine, thought of a song, and then fired up the PowerBook only to find the song wasn't available.

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efithian

Previews can be saved

04/21, 10:44am, EDT

Once you search for a song, control-click the preview link and choose download to disk. This puts an iTunes music file which can be played in iTunes or QT music player. You can paste several together into some bizarre collection of clips.

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