Introduction

The Digital Audio Access Protocol, or DAAP, is used by Apple's iTunes 4.0 digital audio player to share music across a network or the Internet. It provides capability not only to stream audio from one computer to another, but also to list the host's playlists so that they can be accessed remotely.

This project's aim is to completely document the protocol (until official documentation becomes available) and to provide a working, open source, client and server implementation that is compatible with iTunes. That way, any application developer can use the protocol within their own software creations.

News

May 8, 2003

I have received an email from Amandeep Jawa, Senior Software Engineer for iTunes, who worked on DAAP. He says that there will soon be official documentation for the protocol from Apple, which will immensely help in the effort. In the mean time, I'm still going to be working on libdaap using my reverse-engineered docs.

- Chris Boot

libdaap

This is a C++ library with C and Objective-C/Cocoa wrappers that will, in time, implement a full DAAP client and server. It is licensed under the GNU Lesser Public License, which allows developers to use the library even in non-free software as long as a few restrictions are followed.

At the moment only the C++ interface is available, and it only understands the basic format of the data. It does not yet perform any network operations and thus also doesn't have a higher level interface for listing music and playlists. It also can only act as a client for the moment.