Mac Geekery

Apple has a program for their music producers called iTunes Producer (bottom of the page) that lets artists and pimps alike upload tracks to the iTunes Music Store. And although Apple wants you to sign up as a music maker or pimp to get access to the program, they’re happily uploading it to tens of thousands of installations of Mac OS X Server worldwide.

You see, Mac OS X Server includes a Software Update Server process that lets you mirror updates from Apple for your local network and approve or deny them for release to your managed clients. That’s pretty cool in and of itself, but to do this it has to mirror all the updates available from Apple, which includes iTunes Producer. And since Apple’s not a fan of patching software in an update, you wind up with a whole copy of the program.

Without an artist or pimp account this program is useless. The primary reasons for doing this are 1) Apple is limiting the distribution of the program on one hand and handing it out on the other and 2) it provides some insight into the workings of the iTunes Music Store.

So, first off, find a Mac OS X Server running the Software Update service. That cuts out 90% of you right there, I know. Can’t be helped.

Second, open up Terminal and do the following:

~ $ cd /usr/share/swupd/html
/usr/share/swupd/html $ ls -l */*/iTunesProducer*
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel    14123 May 10  2005 061-1534/hKYVzVfvwzv7bjxcmdLXPdsKmy3k3yskHR/iTunesProducer.English.dist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      574 May 10  2005 061-1534/hKYVzVfvwzv7bjxcmdLXPdsKmy3k3yskHR/iTunesProducer.pkm
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel     1464 May 10  2005 061-1534/hKYVzVfvwzv7bjxcmdLXPdsKmy3k3yskHR/iTunesProducer.pkm.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel  1126400 Oct 31  2005 061-1534/hKYVzVfvwzv7bjxcmdLXPdsKmy3k3yskHR/iTunesProducer.tar
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      578 Oct 31  2005 061-2161/4rftGHVRPKtYqDZdPLscXB2q7VWhwcxySc/iTunesProducer.pkm
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel     1469 Oct 31  2005 061-2161/4rftGHVRPKtYqDZdPLscXB2q7VWhwcxySc/iTunesProducer.pkm.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel  1157120 Oct 31  2005 061-2161/4rftGHVRPKtYqDZdPLscXB2q7VWhwcxySc/iTunesProducer.tar

See those TAR files? That there’s the gold. Copy the most recent or largest of the ones you see to your desktop and open it. Inside you’ll find another tarball, open that for the package installer.

So, some legal talk here. If you read the license agreement that comes up in the package installer you’ll find that it’s against the EULA to install the software without an artist agreement with Apple. Note that a compressed/archived version of the program as exists on the computer at this point in time is not a working copy. Up until now, it’s just hackery. If you go further, well that’s just up to you.

From the outside, you can use lsbom to see what files will be installed with the program:

~/iTunesProducer/iTunesProducer.pkg/Contents $ lsbom Archive.bom 
...
./Applications/iTunes Producer.app      40775   0/80
...
./Library/Documentation/Applications/iTunes Producer/Using iTunes Producer.app  40775   0/80
...

It installs two programs: the program itself and a help program. Sounds like fun. Off I go to register an account for Spinal Tap…