Tender Lovemaking

Here’s a quick program I came up with to query iTunes shares as soon as they connect. It uses dnssd to query for iTunes over multicast dns, and Net::DAAP::Client (ruby iTunes client) to query the iTunes share. The program will wait until someone starts up iTunes and automatically queries the iTunes server.

require 'rubygems'
require 'dnssd'
require 'net/daap'

Thread.abort_on_exception = true

class ITunesResolver
  @@servers = {}
  def self.resolve(br, action = :add)
    Thread.new(br, action) { |br, action|
      DNSSD.resolve(br.name, br.type, br.domain) { |rr|
        tr = rr.text_record

        # Skip servers that have a password
        if ! tr.has_key? "Password" or tr["Password"] == "false"
          if action == :add
            @@servers[rr.target] = Thread.new(rr.target) { |t|

              # Connect to the server and list all songs
              daap = Net::DAAP::Client.new(t)
              daap.connect do |dsn|
                daap.databases do |db|
                  # Print song names
                  db.songs.sort.each { |s| puts s.name }
                end
              end # End DAAP Query
            }
          else
            (@@servers.delete rr.target).kill if @@servers.has_key? rr.target
          end
        end
        rr.service.stop
      }
    }
  end
end

browse_service = DNSSD.browse('_daap._tcp') do |browse_reply|
  if browse_reply.flags.add?
    ITunesResolver.resolve(browse_reply)
  else
    ITunesResolver.resolve(browse_reply, :del)
  end
end

$stdin.gets
browse_service.stop

It’s not perfect, but the bugs are left as an exercise for the reader to fix!

I just released a new version of the ruby iTunes client, Net::DAAP::Client version 0.2.1. I also released Digest::M4P as a Gem and made daapclient depend on it. I wasn’t able to release Digest::M4P as a gem until RubyGems version 0.9.0 was released because of a weird bug. But now that 0.9.0 is here, everything works! Too bad the digest code still doesn’t work on windows…….

I need to release my pure ruby MD5 so that I can make Digest::M4P pure ruby and not have to worry about this windows stuff.

I’m trying to think of cool stuff for a Ruby presentation, so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial for the Ruby iTunes client here to see how it sounds.

Introduction:
DAAP stands for “Digital Audio Access Protocol”, and is the protocol used by Apple’s iTunes to share music over a network. Hence the name Net::DAAP::Client.
Continue reading…