Accessing iTunes on Linux

I found a really slick tool today that I have found quite enjoyable thus far. Since my recent and wholehearted move to Ubuntu on the desktop, I have never really looked back. There are however a couple pieces of software not available to me now that I have made the open source change. One of these is iTunes, which currently only has Windows and an OSX versions. Well, there are plenty of amiable open source media players that would be fine for playing MP3's (although iTunes has very user friendly playlist management and library functionalities, so that's not really much of a downside. However, the real drawback comes when trying to listen to music shared out by other iTunes users. I had assumed this was fairly difficult without having an iTunes client. In fact, I was trying to figure out some way I could run iTunes inside of Wine. That was until today.

Enter ourTunes. This Java based iTunes client not only allows the user to view other iTunes shares on the network, there is the added bonus of also being able to download them in mp3 to the local HDD. Sweet!! And, since ourTunes is written in Java, i will run on anything with a JVM installed. With so many awesome tunes floating out there on the office network, I can now enjoy them on my Linux box without having to contrive some connived method of emulating the functionality. I had already used Synaptic Package Manager to download an appropriate JVM to be able to run Zend for my PHP development, so all I had to do was download the ourTunes jar file and fire it up, and I've been rockin' ever since.