Introducing phpTunesDB

iPhone & iPod Touch Add comments

phpTunesDB is the new Web App I mentioned in my last post.

It’s purpose is to allow you to download your music and videos over wifi using a web browser.

Why?
Because I was at a friend’s house and offered to let him copy some of my music from my iPod Touch, however, I had to install iTunes to do it and both of us are very anti-iTunes.
Also, because iPods store their media in folders/files such as F00/m00001.mp3. Basically, you can’t tell what file is what just by looking at them.

How it works:
phpTunesDB scans your iTunesDB (this is where Title, Artist, Album, etc information is stored, along with the the filename of the corresponding file). This scanning process can take several minutes depending on how much media you have on your iPhone/iPod. So after it scans the file the first time, it stores the information in a sqlite database for faster access until your iTunesDB file is updated again.

You can see a demo of what phpTunesDB looks like here: http://www.samutz.com/phpTunesDB/

And to install phpTunesDB, grab it from my repository, http://i.samutz.com/, in the Web Apps category.
Apache (Networking) and PHP (Development) is required before you can install it. If you don’t know how to configure Apache to use PHP, install my AutoConfig Apache+PHP package (Utilities).

Originally, I wanted phpTunesDB to have the ability to create a zip of selected files so that you could download many at once, however the PHP runtime package does not come with the extensions required to do it, and I haven’t found anyway to add extensions yet. I even finished all the code that would handle this process just to find later that it couldn’t be done.

4 Responses to “Introducing phpTunesDB”

  1. annafil Says:

    any chance you could re-upload your phptunesdb or e-mail it to me? I’m trying to code a web interface to transfer audio to the ipod. Would really appreciate your example on accessing iTunesDB

  2. Samutz Says:

    I don’t have the files for it anymore.
    Besides, it was designed for 1.1.x. In 2.0 Apple changed up the iTunesDB format and added some encryption or something to it that prevented 3rd party apps from adding music to it for a while. I haven’t messed with it since then.

  3. Samutz Says:

    On another note, I do recall seeing a php library somewhere for reading the iTunesDB. I think it was only for traditional iPods (classic, nano, etc) though.

    Also, I used this page for reference:
    http://www.ipodlinux.org/wiki/ITunesDB
    I don’t know if any of it still applies in 2.x.

    This may be something I’ll look in to again when I have free time.

  4. Samutz Says:

    Here’s a iTunes PHP thing:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/itunesphp/
    Don’t know if it’s the same one I saw before.

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