Sorry for the delay in responding to all of you over the last week and a half. My family had a health crisis. More specifically one of my family members was thought to have cancer. Turns out that everything is going to be just fine but that made for one hell of a few days.

Over the last few months I have been flooded with hundreds of emails. One recurring theme was a request for OurTunes without the need for iTunes.

Today I would like to announce the official branching of this project. We will continue to work on reverse engineering iTunes but James Sedgwick has developed the beginning of a completely new application to manage music over a network.

And it is currently in the alpha stage.

Thats right ladies and gents, it works. More development is needed but it works. Developers who want to help out on this project can contact me through saveourtunes [at] gmail [dot] com as usual.

Wanna know more?

Of course you do.

For the software to work both computers need to be running a copy and there are no connection restrictions unlike the sharing in iTunes.

We even have a screenshot (here is the full sized one)

As always spread the word!

Several people have recently suggested downgrading to iTunes 6 as a stopgap solution until the new version of OurTunes is working. To that end I have found a simple guide to getting rid of iTunes 7 and reinstalling iTunes 6.

But wait, there is more.

I put together a nice little zip file with OurTunes, iTunes 6 and the instructions on how to downgrade! Get it here (I could use some mirrors for those of you with websites, the file is just about 36 MB and that adds up pretty quickly)

Pretty sweet eh?

How to Downgrade

Step 1: Backup
Back up your iTunes 7 settings, so that you can keep them around in case you want to go back.

Go into your My Documents folder, then your My Music folder. Copy the iTunes folder inside there to somewhere else. That’ll save your settings.

Note: That’s the default location, if you’ve moved things around it’ll be somewhere else. If you need help finding it, search for files ending in .itl on your hard drive.

Step 2: Uninstall iTunes 7
Now, uninstall iTunes 7. Go to your Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, iTunes and hit Uninstall.

Reboot as it asks you to when it’s done.

Step 3: Install iTunes 6.0.5
Install iTunes 6 by running the installer.

Step 4: Try to run iTunes 6
You should get this error message:
The file “iTunes Library.itl” cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes.

Step 5: Restore your old library
Go back into My Documents/My Music. Now go into the iTunes folder. Rename your iTunes Library.itl as iTunes Library.itl.old. Go into the Previous iTunes Libraries folder (which would be in MyDocuments\MyMusic\Previous iTunes Libraries). Take the newest file (for me this was iTunes Library 2006-09-14.itl) and copy it back up to the iTunes folder. Rename it iTunes Library.itl. Run iTunes 6 and you should be all set, with your library restored.

Thanks to blog.dominik.net for the original downgrade instructions.

Download the files

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