tue, 22-aug-2006, 16:56

Back in April I wrote about some methods for seeing who is connected to your iTunes library and what they're listening to. Or downloading. There's actually a much easier way to see what's been accessed, at least if you're on a Mac. (Note that this might work under Cygwin on a Windows machine if the Windows filesystem stores access time.)

In Unix all files have three dates associated with them; creation time, last time modified, and last time accessed. You can see all of these times for a particular file by using the stat command. For example, in a terminal window:

$ stat The Jesus Lizard/Down/01 Fly On The Wall.m4a
234881026 2016664 -rw-r--r-- 1 0 4733250
"Aug 22 14:22:57 2006"
"May 12 07:45:03 2006"
"May 12 07:45:03 2006"

(I've edited the result slightly)

The three times shown are the last accessed, last modified, and the creation date. For this file, you can see that it was accessed earlier today. Since I wasn't playing any music with iTunes today, someone else accessed this file through my shared iTunes library.

There's an easier way to, ahem, find this information:

$ find ~/Music -type f -amin -360

This command shows all the files in the Music directory (where your iTunes music is stored by default) that were accessed in the last 6 hours. Students have just started showing up for the fall semester here at UAF, and when I ran this command at the end of the day, it yielded 451 tracks that other people on campus listened to. I also had my watch_itunes.py Python script running for part of the day, and it was clear from watching, that most of these "listeners" were actually downloading these tracks.

I wonder how long before this becomes a problem for the Recording Industry Association of America? Seems like Apple has created their own P2P filesharing network by allowing iTunes to share tracks in the same network block. Apple can claim it's not their problem because purchased tracks with their FairPlay DRM won't play on anyone else's computer. But what about all those ripped M4A and MP3's files that will play anywhere? It's a free-for-all, thanks to Apple.

Me says to RIAA lawyer: Talk to Apple. I'm just using iTunes, nothing more.

tags: music 
Meta Photolog Archives