El Tunes - iTunes Music Playback

[Polygon]

i just saw this over at engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/26/el-tunes-gives-linux-users-itms-playback-capabilities/



It has been a solid tick since we've seen a good FairPlay hack, so it's with great pleasure that we pass along El Tunes for Ubuntu 8.04 users everywhere. Tested to work on Hardy Heron using RhythmBox (but assumed to work on any modern Linux Distro with GStreamer and a media player that utilizes GStreamer), said plug-in enables open-source aficionados to play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. As for limitations, the current version has no Pause / Seek support and cannot de-authorize a machine for playback, but a future version should hopefully cure those two quirks and add support for purchased video content and audio streaming to an AirTunes device. Give it a shot and let us know how it treats ya.

so you can download a ubuntu deb here:

http://www.el-tunes.com/

im not on linux at the moment, can anyone confirm that it works?

[cardinals_fan]

Sounds legally dubious to me...

[bp1509]

legally dubious for the makers, i hardly doubt anyone would do anything to the users.

[vanden12]

Or you chould just remove the drm....

http://hymn-project.org/

[Polygon]

last time i tried that it said my versions of itunes was too recent and i had to downgrade, and then when i did it didnt work cause itunes updates the music files or something

and this would be LESS dubious in the law i would think, because since apple provides no platform for playing itms songs in linux, it just allows you to play them...it doesnt remove the drm...and you still have to authorize (from what the article said) yourself with the itunes servers.

[Mateo]

Seems like the user base for this thing is super duper small. You have to have purchased the music on iTunes, which is not available for Linux. Then you must want to play the music on linux, which you purchased from a non-linux machine. So it's for people who own both operating systems but do their music shopping on the windows/apple computer. Seems like a big headache, should just use Amazon anyways.

[fluteflute]

Legally dubious maybe, but very useful to those who have switched from windows )or mac) with a massive stockpile of music.

And Amazon MP3 is not available outside the US (e.g. in the UK).


Personally I stick to CDs, Play.com and 7Digital but not everything is available at a reasonable price compared to iTunes/Amazon.

[Polygon]

well i know if this does work, it would be super helpful for prospective converts, who might of bought music from the ITMS

i will try it out tommrow as i still have a few cds i bought from ITMS, even though i ripped them to cd and then converted them back to flac (so they quality didnt get any worse from buring to a cd and then re-encoding them to a lossy format..again)

[Wolfpack Fan]

I am a relative noob to linux (about 1 year with Ubuntu now) and have since been hyping it up to people I know. Well a coworker just had her laptop crash and lost Xp and all her i-tunes music. Long story short, I ended up with her computer and her ipod and installed Ubuntu on it. I set it up and made it look pretty.

Problem was I could not get her i-tunes DRM protected music to work. She has over 450 songs that she purchased through i-tunes that were still on her ipod. It was going to be tough selling her on Linux if she could not play her music she purchased.

El-tunes was the savior. I installed it, authorized the computer, and now she can use rythmbox to transfer all her music between her computer and her laptop, as well as play them on her comp.

When I showed her the new system she was very happy, and there is one more Linux user.

[Vadi]

:)

[Vadi]

First RC released, from what I read it adds a GUI for the authentication and pause/play support: http://digg.com/linux_unix/El_Tunes_Release_Candidate_1_now_available

[3rdalbum]

@vanden12: You probably don't want to mention that particular project around here - last time I did I got cautioned :-)

El-tunes looks like a great idea, except: It's still enforcing DRM. To most people in the open-source community, DRM is unacceptable.

I burnt+reripped my iTunes Music Store purchases a long time ago.

[solitaire]

Seems like the user base for this thing is super duper small. You have to have purchased the music on iTunes, which is not available for Linux. Then you must want to play the music on linux, which you purchased from a non-linux machine. So it's for people who own both operating systems but do their music shopping on the windows/apple computer. Seems like a big headache, should just use Amazon anyways.

The point is that linux is getting more ex-windows, users who may have been using itunes for years! This gives them the ability to play those tracks without trying to install wine and itunes....