Everyone knows that sharing media between devices can be a nightmare: sure, images, generally go across fine, but if you want to share your music playlists with a friend, there’s usually a good amount of time-wasting figuring out how to get the files across. And if an iPod and Apple’s FairPlay DRM are involved, things get even more complicated.
Enter doubleTwist, a new desktop application from Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jonn. Available now for Windows (with Mac OS X support promised in the second quarter), doubleTwist purports to let people share media between friends and family as well as sync media with popular devices like the Sony PSP, Nokia N Series phones, Windows Mobile devices, and more. Even if that media is in iTunes and protected by Apple’s FairPlay DRM.
“We’ve built a format agnostic solution that handles the complexity of file and device compatibility so consumers don’t have to,” said Johansen, doubleTwist’s founder and CTO.
The doubleTwist desktop application lets users share content by simply dragging files back and forth between friends. doubleTwist detects when supported devices are connected; users just select the media they want to transfer and the application does all the heavy lifting. doubleTwist is also offering “Twist me!,” a social networking application that enables users to share media on their profile pages on Facebook.
Both the doubleTwist desktop application and “Twist me” are available for free. doubleTwist also promises support “soon” for Apple iPhone users by accessing doubleTwist via the integrated Safari Web browser.
doubleTwists’ announcement and materials don’t make any mention of stripping DRM from protected files, and doubleTwist’s CEO Monique Farantzos and DVD Jon are trying to position doubleTwist as a legitimate software business. However, Apple has historically taken a very dim view of anyone circumventing its content protections technology—despite encouraging record labels to sell music without DRM—so we may be looking at a battle of wits between DVD Jon and Cupertino if Apple decides to keep doubleTwist out of iTunes.
