Sunday, 12 January 2003
iCommune is a very neat idea, taking advantage of OS X's built-in Apache WebDAV server, WebDAV filesystem and iTunes' device plugins to provide simple peer-to-peer music sharing between computers. The iCommune “server” produces an index of the ID3 tags, which the client reads via HTTP—that way the client doesn't have to scan the entire hierarchy manually, yet has all the metadata needed to fill out the iTunes listing. You don't even need the WebDAV server to be a Mac—included is a Python tag indexer which works virtually anywhere.
I've already got it set up between my PowerBook and desktop G4—so far, so good. (I also meant to go home an hour and a half ago!)