Altruism is an application that monitors your uploaded songs, and automatically adds these to a playlist in iTunes. Like having your friends over, playing songs from your computer, but on a much larger scale.
Currently, support for SoulseeX and ShakesPeer is implemented, but Altruism is written in a modular way to allow for additional providers in the future.
Download the latest version of Altruism, it requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. For source code, visit the project page.
Note that Altruism is still a work-in-progress!
For Altruism to work correctly, you need to configure your applications to output proper log files.
SoulseeX has a pane in preferences called “Logs”, where you need to check the boxes “Transfer Activity” and “Log console messages”. ShakesPeer has a pane in preferences called “Advanced”, where you need to change the log level to “Debug”.
As of version 1.1, Altruism can set these preferences for you automatically on startup.
To use Altruism, simply start the application. When a song finishes uploading in any of the supported applications, it will be added to a playlist called “Altruism” in iTunes, provided that iTunes is open. After that, you can use smart playlists to manipulate the base playlist.
One of our favourites is to add a smart playlist where playlist is “Altruism” and last played is before [current time], where [current time] is when you created the smart playlist, for example 2008-03-30 04:00. Now, played songs will automatically be removed from the list.
Altruism was written by Markus Amalthea Magnuson with help from Håkan Waara, based on an idea by Rasmus Fleischer. Read about the most advanced file sharing event in history, which is where we got the pretty, golden graphics.
Be sure to send any ideas, patches and miscellany, help us improve Altruism! For other projects, visit the mothership.
If you like Altruism and would like to support its further development, please make a donation.
1.0 was released in late March 2008. 1.1 was released two weeks later; it could set the preferences of soulseeX and ShakesPeer automatically, as well as update itself using Sparkle.