RE: [core-dev] iTunes playlist sharing

Hi Dan,

Welcome to the LimeWire community!

The wish-list is somewhat out-of-date, but there's plenty of great ideas on
there, including the one you looked at.  To be perfectly honest, I'm not
exactly sure what "Sharing portions of iTunes selections by choosing a
playlist" means.  My guess is that it means LimeWire can detect playlists in
iTunes and offer to share (via LimeWire) the files in certain playlists.  It
could also mean that LimeWire can share more playlists via DAAP (the
protocol that lets iTunes see & play LimeWire's playlists in real-time).
Based on your comments, I'm guessing it's the former.

Your analysis seems to be spot-on.  Altering DIRECTORIES_TO_SHARE seems to
be the "correct" way to do it, though it is plagued with much greater
difficulty.  If you do want to go this route, there are further
customizations that might be fun to add along the way, such as the ability
to share selected files within a directory (instead of the entire
directory), to not share subdirectories, etc...  These are all features that
we'd like to see added, time permitting.  Specifically, when native 'drop'
support is added (right now just 'drag' support exists), we'd like to be
able to have folks drop files/folders onto LimeWire and have LimeWire ask if
they'd like to share those files -- this would require LimeWire to be able
to share specific files instead of full folders.

That aside, adding PLAYLISTS_TO_SHARE is really much easier, and gets the
job done just as well.

One question, though, is how would LimeWire know what iTunes playlists
exist?  Would it be scanning for m3u playlists, or is there some way of
retrieving the playlists from iTunes?  On OSX, LimeWire could use
AppleScript to find out.  On Windows, there's a COM SDK for iTunes that's
available (but that would require some native code that can interface COM
with Java).  Personally, I think it'd suffice to be able to create 'share
playlists' within LimeWire -- pseudo-directories that are really a
collection of files, so that someone using LimeWire can easily share/unshare
them at will.

Feel free to keep mailing here to let us know how it's going, or to ask for
more info.  
 
Thanks,
 Sam

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:core-dev-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Daniel Naab
> Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 7:11 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [core-dev] iTunes playlist sharing
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Curiosity has gotten the best of me, and I've recently done a CVS
> checkout and thought I'd tackle one of the items on the "wish-list."  I
> hope the following question hasn't been detailed in the bug tracking
> system already, but it seems to be down right now.
> 
> One of the items on the list is "Sharing portions of iTunes selections
> by choosing a playlist."  After looking at the code I see there a
> couple of ways it could be tackled.
> 
> The settings system is storing all the user selected directories in a
> FileArraySetting called DIRECTORIES_TO_SHARE.  Ideally, instead of
> maintaining a list of Files, this would be a list of an interface
> providing access to the available files in that directory (or
> playlist).  Alternatively, a second setting called something like
> PLAYLISTS_TO_SHARE could be created and additional logic would be added
> elsewhere.
> 
> The first option seems the best, as it would also implicitly allow
> other groupings of files to be shared - i.e., playlists of another type
> or even a dynamic "smart" search where the user could apply detailed
> rules to a certain directory or drive.  It would, however, also require
> code changes in several places to generalize the access of available
> files.
> 
> I'll try and tackle the problem in this way, but want to make sure I'm
> not stepping on any design decisions already made.  Is there any reason
> not to do this?
> 
> Thanks, and good work on Limewire!
> 
> Dan Naab
> 
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