February 10, 2009

KavaTunes

Matt clued me into an interesting piece of software called KavaTunes last night. He found it on the Mac Heist website as one of their free software titles when you solve puzzles in one of their yearly heists. I was not interested at first, however after watching him for a bit, I quickly wanted a copy as well. What KavaTunes is, is a piece of software that builds a php page of your iTunes library, but to take it a step further, it even looks like your iTunes library! This may be the simplest way to get access to your music on a local network, and on the campus network it is a perfect solution.

Oh course my g4 server is my test bed for playing with things and has a custom apache and php setups, so unlike Matt I had quite a bit of extra trouble with the setup. (With Matt laughing at the issues I was having the whole time ^_^) First off was that KavaTunes always builds in ~/Library/Webserver/Documents/ however I have a custom webserv folder instead, so it took a while to figure out why it was not building in the right place, but a symbolic link fixed that. Then do not call your iTunes music folder iTunes as KavaTunes adds a another separate folder under this name with its required php files. And lastly do not mess up your symbolic links, as it just causes a general mess. After about 30 minutes of bug fixing, which would have been nice if it gave you some warning about these things, I was up and running. It even streams my movies and tv shows I have on iTunes.

If you are interested grab a copy from Mac Heist

No comments: