The OpenDAAP forum is a venue for all people and companies making clients or servers that implement the Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) first popularized by Apple's iTunes.

Network music sharing on a local LAN is not hard to do — that's the problem. Every company is currently inventing their own incompatible solution. Imagine if, instead of the standard red and white analog RCA connectors, every piece of HiFi equipment used a different standard, with different connectors, different voltage levels, and different signal encodings. Life would be hell for the customers. Equipment from one vendor wouldn't work with equipment from another vendor. Sometimes two pieces of equipment from different divisions of the same company wouldn't work together. Because of that, people woudn't buy much equipment, so the market for HiFi equipment would be tiny. How many Playstations would Sony sell if you could only connect them to Sony televisions (and only certain Sony models at that)? And... if there were no market for Sony Playstations, what market would there be for Playstation games?

Where should you go from here? Get involved, find out who is doing what. Here is a list of current activities. If you find something or someone is missing - send us a link.

Ongoing Open Source projects:

• SourceForge libdaap - Client library from sourceforge. Runs on MacOSX and POSIX.
• SourceForge daapd - DAAP server from source forge. Runs on MacOSX, Microsoft, Linux
• dapple - Client library for Perl from Nathan Torkington, Rob Flickenger and Todd Larason
• deleet daaplib - Client from deleet. Runs under Win2000, MacOSX, Linux and Irix
• deleet daapd - DAAP server from deleet. Runs under MacOSX and POSIX
• DAAP protocol information - Todd Larason
• Digital Audio Access Protocol documentation from tapjam.net
• mt-daapd an iTunes server for Linux, OSX, and other POSIX Unix machines.

To date, Apple has officially licensed the DAAP protocol to only one third party vendor: Roku.

shipping products

• Apple iTunes
• Roku M1000 and M2000 play music streamed from iTunes
• Olive Musica supports streaming from and to iTunes
• ... and more on their way from other vendors ...