James Speth’s iCommune is once again available for download. With iCommune installed, you and other users can share each other’s iTunes libraries. iCommune music collections appear as iTunes playlists. You can browse through them, stream or download the music those playlists contain.
iCommune was originally released in January but was pulled from circulation shortly thereafter. Speth had used application programming interfaces, or APIs, licensed from Apple to create the original version of iCommune. The APIs in question had been created by Apple specifically to provide makers of hardware MP3 players the ability to create compatible plug-ins to make their devices compatible with iTunes.
Apple claimed that Speth had violated his license by using the technology to create iCommune and terminated the license accordingly. Speth pulled iCommune from circulation at Apple’s behest, but promised to re-release the software once he had the chance to rewrite it without using any of Apple’s code.
“It’s definitely an alpha version, but it seems to work pretty well for me,” Speth noted on his Web site.
This new version, iCommune 2.0a1, has been rewritten from the ground up as a standalone application that communicates with iTunes via open interfaces, and is thus free of any licensing restrictions, according to Speth. What’s more, iCommune is now being developed as an open source project, and its source code is available for download from SourceForge.