Who sees it possible to use Apple’s newly released Rendezvous source code, the standards based seamless networking and service discovery protocol over IP, to generate a auto descovering peer to peer music sharing network without all the application overhead of today’s p2p networks?
I’m envisioning a plugin to iTunes (possibly coupled with Apple’s free and open source Streaming Server) that shares your music library with anyone on the network, and allows you to stream it to them, or if desired actually copy the mp3 from a remote machine. We could have an almost infinite playlist just by connecting to the web and letting the plugin auto discover neighboring machines. No fumbling through lengthy searches with proprietary ad based solutions like Kazaa. Connect to the web and your music library would expand as machines find each other, just pick a genre/artist and hit play.
You could even include auto downloading of preferred artists, or oft played songs, using a solution similar to the iTunes top 25 list. For example you could set a threshold to auto download a song if you stream it 3 or more times. A music library that evolves as you listen.
Maybe there is some other solution out there for this, but I think with this protocol, tied with the iTunes elegance would be ideal.
Update: This is almost exactly what I envisioned, though it’s not with iTunes.
