I am outta here
by Volker Weber
Lucy is busy, very busy as you can see. She is downloading stuff from the FTP server. But her CPU graph would look just the same. She is recoding music as MP3. And it will take her two days to get it done. And it is all because I made a mistake, a very silly mistake actually.
The mistake I made was to encode music with AAC, the Advanced Audio Codec of MGEG-4. If you have music encoded with AAC you can listen to it with iTunes and on the iPod. Fine. I have that. There is nothing else that plays AAC. That is fine with me today, but how about tomorrow? Apple has just demonstrated with the iTunes "Upgrade" to version 4.7 who they side with. They deliberately broke daapd and iPod Download. Which makes my life harder. Because I cannot move my music where I want it. iTunes will not let me move my music from one machine to the other. I can listen to it just fine. But I cannot consolidate it with iTunes alone. I just moved three iTunes libraries to one machine and merged them there. With daapd I could move a file over the network without resorting to a file server. But with the tools Apple lets me have now, I cannot look at meta data. I need to look at files and directories. Assume you want to take that playlist of songs you built on your iMac to your iBook so you can play them at a party. No can do.
Steve J. said, that people want to own their music. He is right. I am not advocating stealing your music. But I want to be able to do with it what I want and not what Apple lets me do with it. I have more CDs than I can fit in my CD-changer. And that holds 400 at a time. When I encode them to my computer I do not want to be restricted by closed formats and proprietary protocols. And I do not trust Apple's AAC, nor Microsoft's WMA or SONY's ATRAC. I will stick with MP3, the format that Steve B. called "stolen". He can call it anything he wants. But I like it because I plays with everything that is out there.
When Lucy is finished tomorrow night, the last AAC file has left my computers.
Comments
Hi Volker,
I agree a 100 %! I'm re-importing my CD-Collection (about 800...) into iTunes as well (though it'll take some time) - this time in MP3-Format instead of AAC. This way it's also a lot easier to burn MP3-CD's that my Home-Stereo-System can play... Sadly, sadly - Apple is not that perfect all the time :-)
Hi,
is there a re-encoder that takes AAC and spits out MP3?
Or do I have to re-import the AAC-encoded CDs?
Best regards,
Andreas
Go to iTunes preferences. Select MP3 as your import format. Mark all AAC tracks. Import as MP3. Delete all AAC tracks.
AAC is an open standard. There are open source implementations IIRC.
What's the story about daap being broken? Last time I checked my stuff worked...
And about iPodDownload: http://www.scifihifi.com/weblog/mac/iPod-ESAD.html
Everybody is entitled to his share of paranoia of course, just trying to help...
I agree with Martin, the stories about daap being broken are not true.
I just had a go at installing it on my UbuntuLinux box and it works better than ever.
(Nice to see my files shared on my home Lan again!)
Thank you guys for reminding me this interesting project which I had already tested at the early stages. It is fully functional now and can be installed wit hjust a few clicks
Martin, Pieterjan, thanks for pointing out that daapd is still working for you. I guess it was my initial post that made Volker believe daapd to be broken, too.
What happened here was that both, daapd and my preferred mt-daapd would deliver the song list but I wasn't able to play one single song. As this happened after upgrading to iTunes 4.7 I believed this to be the problem. After your posts I did some more investigations and traced the problem down to a broken gigabit ethernet NIC in my server. It just dropped every second packet. After replacing the network card, both servers are running perfectly once again.
Stefan, it's always the cable ;-)
Right. I corrected my initial post to reflect (a) that it is not broken and (b) that I believed it was.
Question: Do you think that Apple would not break it, if it got really popular?
Entirely different question: How are you generating the graph?
With MRTG.
Why should Apple break daap? I can't see the business decision that would require that. It only adds value to iTunes' portfolio...
In fact, it seems Apple and Amandeep Jawa are quite open and collaborative about it. See http://daap.sourceforge.net/
They could decide to break the protocol the very day they want to introduce a commercial server of their own with extended functionality. Mind you that I said could. At the moment, at least to my knowledge, both daapd and mt-daapd are available for Linux only. So my guess is that this is not considered to be a relevant market by Apple. Once both of them make it to either Mac OS (haven't seen a port yet but haven't been looking for one either) and Windows (did one myself but currently don't have the time to follow up on that and port newer versions), there might be a business case.
Sounds a bit far fetched to me.
About the Mac OS version of daapd: I'm running it on my Mac OS X Server box. No porting required.
Martin, if you're in need of some more far fetched business plans, just drop me a note. Would require you to pay my standard rates, though ;-)
Back on topic: I've contemplated compiling (mt-)daapd on my Mac for quite some time now. Would you mind telling me how you did it or, to be more precise, what tools you were using (gcc or Xcode)?
As an aside: daapd seems to be more stable than mt-dappd but the latter has got that nice web interface. So I'm still undecided about what to use in the future.
Let me ease that decision for you: What features would you like to see in a potential web interface to daapd? I happen to have a bit of spare time this week.
For starters that would be:
* clients conntected to the server
* current song delivered to the client
* last error in connection to a particular client
* general status of the server task (like scanning for new files etc.)
Nice to read you again, btw ;-)
