Access iTunes shares from Rhythmbox?

Question

Its a bit of a tease that I can see iTunes shares on the local network in Rhythmbox, but I'm unable to access them. Is there anything I can do to enable access to function?

Solution 1

Starting with iTunes 7 Apple started encrypting access to DAAP to stop this kind of feature. Unfortunately there's not much application developers can do.

Here's a bug report in Ubuntu with information.

Some players (such as Banshee) have an informational page explaining to the user why it can't connect. Filing a bug on rhythmbox to explain why it can't connect would probably be prudent so it doesn't just give you an inexplicable error.

Solution 2

You have 4 options:

1. Switch to a version of iTunes older than 7
2. Complain to Apple
3. Spend a few years with some mathematicians and destroy modern theories of cryptography
4. Steal Apple's encryption key

What's going on is that Apple added strong public key encryption to iTunes to prevent interoperability with everything that's not iTunes. It's Apple, expect no less.

Solution 3

One additional option is to run a separate DAAP streaming server on that computer. It's possible to install and set up mt-daapd (or forked-daapd, but I think that has dependency issues on recent OSXes) and point it at your itunes music library. You would then have 2 streams - the one provided by iTunes and the one provided by mt-daapd - make sure to give them different names so you can tell them apart from your music client.

Here's some detailed instructions: http://zettelchen.blogspot.ca/2010/01/firefly-mt-daapd-with-external-drive.html

Comments

[mummey]

Its unfortunate that Rhythmbox will still display these shares even though it cannot access them. Hopefully they address this at some point.

[Oli]

#4 is probably the easiest but wouldn't be allowed to be distributed in the US (and some other places).

[Rob Bazinet]

#5: stop using Apple products ? Ok, that's hardly a solution to the question, but if Apple doesn't want to let you use their product the way you want, why give them publicity/money/etc ?

[Josh Ripley]

Little Jawa, that sounds like the best solution!

[Praxeolitic]

Interesting. Do you know if iTunes has some technical innovation preventing its encryption from being reverse engineered or is it just lack of developer time and resources available for Rhythmbox and similar projects?