Hello everyone, this is my first post on the site. I feel welcomed already.

I come along with a load of bad news. Like at least 50,000 other people, I woke up Tuesday morning to find a gaping hole in the internet that was not goatse.cx. OiNK DOT CD (formerly OiNK DOT Me DOT UK) had been raided, taken down, and replaced by an advertisement for two fascist organizations. I was a member of OiNK for over a year, and a fairly prominent forum user for the last six months. The matter was widely mis-reported by the mainstream media, and it’s a good thing that they spent their time and money getting the facts wrong on OiNK, because San Diego wasn’t on fire or anything.

This is a major blow for the file-sharing community, especially the section devoted to music. I could go on and on about what is wrong with OiNK’s shutdown, but it’s been discussed to death in the past few days. I will say this, though: I wish more than the best to Alan, the former administrator of the site, as well as to the other other admin and the rest of the staff. I also hope that the user-base turns out okay, as I suspect they will. As The PirateBay’s brokep said in his response to the shutdown, the answer to this problem lies not in a single site, but in many sites to ease the burden and the feeling of emptiness should take-down attacks be successful in the future.

So where does this leave OurTunes? Well, it means that the need for a new means of sharing music is just that much more needed in our society. Apple has a responsibility and an obligation to stop filesharers from abusing the network system. We can see this in the release of iTunes 7. We as the users, have an obligation to get around their efforts. With the loss of OiNK, OurTunes is all the more important to music fans. We no longer have a nearly-complete database of artists’ catalogs to browse at our leisure, but we at least have each other’s iTunes libraries. And that’s a start.

I have been tied up with other projects, namely school and work, of late and while our forums are hot hot hot I have not been able to give time to this blog. So here is an open casting call for bloggers!

If you are passionate about DRM, music, ourtunes, or anything related to being able to use our music our way (Hence “Save Our Tunes”) shoot me an email at saveourtunes {at} gmail [dot] com

Major bugs are being fixed as development continues on OurTunes Middleman.

You can download the latest version right here
Some notes from the developer :

User’s note:
1.  many bug fixes/changes (see developer’s notes) are included in this version of ourTunes;
a.  incomplete /interrupted downloads self delete.
b.  iTunes no longer crashes after a completed download.
c.  the default download directory is now located in the user’s music folder (this is OS-dependent).  Look for the ourTunes folder.
d.  The GUI will display updates throughout program execution.
e.  the format output file is disabled (see developer’s notes).
2.  If you’re having problems sharing, try using ourtunes again before reporting bugs.  Not all of them disappeared from the previous version, but sometimes restarting the software causes minor glitches to disappear.
3.  When you do report bugs, I’ll need the OS you’re using, along with a description of the network you’re attached to.  I’d like to keep this thread open to developers, and request that a new thread be created for user-reported bugs.

Developer’s notes:
1.  The last missing piece of the program is the tag reading from music files; once this item is completed, I can support the format pane on the GUI (see user notes #1e).  I’ve imposed 4 requirements;
a.  you’ll need to implement the ourtunes.music.Song interface.
b.  Please provide any code contributions by September 20 (see below).
c.  Do not remove the DRM protection on songs (see the ourtunes.music.Song class for guidelines and explanation).
d.  I encourage you to develop classes that can meet the demands of the interface while interacting with the library.

My helpful hints:
a.  to read MP3 files, look at the javamusictag project.
b.  to read AAC files, look at the JHymn project.
c.  Avoid code libraries that rely on native methods (DLLs, C/C++ libraries, etc).  The same code has to work on both Mac and Windows.
2.  If you make changes/improve the project, please let me know so I can include your changes, and credit them to you in the source code.