WhoDere (why isn't this already in iTunes?)

See what they're listening to.

WhoDere has the onerous task of revealing what they're listening to, and who is listening to your shared iTunes music. There's no reason this feature shouldn't be available within iTunes - but it's not.

I wrote it in 2006, but am late to share it (June 11, 2008).

Download WhoDere v1.0 - June 11, 2008

view screenshot

Note in this example the local host computer has the song file Mercury open, which also shows up in the open files list along with other users' music. iTunes provides script support to see what file *you're* listening to, and that title is displayed above.

Limitations

1) There's an IP tab which lists IP addresses of connected guests. With my method there is no way to match which file a specific IP has open - not that IP addresses are all that interesting anyway. In other words, iTunes has files open and IP connections open, and I can see those, but can't match the two.

2) After the file is completely sent to your buddy (i.e. buffered), it falls out of the list and goes to the history even if they're still listening to it for a short time. In these cases, iTunes didn't need to keep the file open anymore, and it closed the file. The connected user's next song will appear in the list when they finish up the current song.

How does it work?

Well, here's the meat of it:

lsof -c iTunes -nPFn | egrep '(m4a|mp3|m4p)'

lsof is a unix command "list open files".

I keep expecting it to stop working at some point - but it's still ticking away. I'm interested in a better way.