Tender Lovemaking » daap

Automatically Query iTunes Shares

Aaron Patterson — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 03:21:16 +0000

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!

New Ruby iTunes Client

Aaron Patterson — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:18:10 +0000

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.

Ruby iTunes Client

Aaron Patterson — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:24:51 +0000

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.

Installation
The client is packaged as a gem, so installation is pretty straightforward. The only hitch is that digest-m4p needs to be installed first. I am currently working on a pure Ruby implementation of Digest::M4P, so hopefully this process will become a lot easier.

First, download Digest::M4P from here. Unzip the tar.gz file, run ruby on extconf.rb, then run ‘make’, and as root run ‘make install’ like this:
$ ruby extconf.rb $ make $ sudo make install [/sourcecode] Once that is installed, just install the daapclient gem: $ sudo gem install daapclient[/sourcecode]


Usage:

Connecting to iTunes is very simple.  Just create a new Net::DAAP::Client, and call connect.  If the connect method is given a block, after the block is executing the client will execute disconnect for you.
daap = Net::DAAP::Client.new('localhost')
daap.connect do |dsn|
...
end # disconnect is called here for us!

DAAP allows any server to contain multiple databases of music, however in practice iTunes servers I have encountered only have one database.  Since a server could have multiple databases, we iterate over them:
daap.databases.each do |db|
...
end

Once we have a handle on the database, we can access the databases attributes, such as the songs, artists, and albums it contains:
db.songs.each { |song| puts song.name }
db.artists.each { |artist| puts artist.name }
db.albums.each { |album| puts album.name }

Putting it All Together:

Now we can see how each piece, connecting to the server, getting the databases, and listing information, fits together with a simple program to list all songs on an iTunes server:
daap = Net::DAAP::Client.new('localhost')
daap.connect do |dsn|
  daap.databases.each do |db|
    db.songs.each { |song| puts song.name }
  end
end

More Information

For more information, be sure to check out the examples in the RDoc here.