Tangerine, Tangerine
I use iTunes 7 to manage my music, but in addition to my Windows PC I have an ever-growing mob of Linux PCs in my house as well as an old G3 Mac that can only run iTunes 6. I wanted a way for all of them to be able to play my iTunes music. Enter Tangerine.
According to their website, “Tangerine is an application that allows you to publish music over the local network…”
Why is this a good thing? In a nutshell, it let’s me listen to music from an iTunes 7 library on a Linux PC. This wasn’t a big deal until somewhat recently. Linux’s Rhythmbox media player (and many others) have been able to play music shared from iTunes for a long time, but with the release of iTunes 7, Apple changed the sharing protocol causing third party clients like Rhythmbox, as well as all pre-7 version of iTunes, to be locked out. Talk about forced upgrade.
Installation is insanely easy, and configuration is also:
That’s it!
All I had to tell it was that I wanted it to share my iTunes musid and it figured out the rest. Within no time I was connected from my Linux box. Ironically enough, since Tangerine uses the same protocol Apple used to share music before iTunes7, iTunes 7 will happily connect to my Tangerine share. This is of course completely useless.
It’s the fruit-shaped one on the far left
The current version is 0.3.0, so don’t expect it to be without some issues. For example, I caught my tangerine-daemon process with its hand in the cookie jar this afternoon:
97% CPU and 159MB of RAM? That’s not good, hackers…
One more thing: Tangerine doesn’t do anything about music purchased from the iTunes Store — it will be visible, but unplayable on non-iTunes clients.
