Share The Rock!

November 15, 2005 3:00 PM

Sharing music between computers via iTunes (using shared library). Anyone know how to do it?

My iTunes preferences allow me to "Share" my entire library, but I have no idea how to do it. I would like to play tunes from someone else's iTunes, and vice-versa. We're in the same office, if that helps. How is this done?

posted by crapples to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Assume one of you is the sharer and the other the sharee. The sharer opens iTunes prefs, clicks on Sharing, and clicks "share my music."

The sharee does the same, but clicks "look for shared music"

That's it! The sharee should see a new "shared music" source in the iTunes sidebar.

Of course, you can both be mutual sharers and sharees by turning on both.
posted by adamrice at 3:06 PM on November 15, 2005

As long as you both have the options in iTunes for "Share entire library" and "Look for shared music" ticked on in the preferences, you should just be able to see each other's libraries in the source list on the left (They appear as a blue icon).

Then you simply click on the other persons library from your itunes, and search/browse until you find what you're looking for.

Also, if you actually want to copy that song to your library, on windows, mytunes redux is just what you want.
posted by snarkle at 3:06 PM on November 15, 2005

That was about as easy as it gets. But it worked like a dream. Thanks a lot!
posted by crapples at 3:25 PM on November 15, 2005

Sweet, I've been wanting to do this with my two Powerbooks at home and now I can't wait to get home and try it!

Thanks adamrice and snarkle!
posted by fenriq at 3:36 PM on November 15, 2005

It cracks me up at work, to look through my co-worker's I-Tunes. Everything from Bootybass in engineering to Celene Dion on the warehouse manager's i-Tunes .
posted by pomegranate at 3:54 PM on November 15, 2005

Is itunes still limited to LAN-only?
posted by meehawl at 4:56 PM on November 15, 2005

The answer to your next question is: http://ourtunes.sourceforge.net/
posted by about_time at 5:24 PM on November 15, 2005

Am I missing sometimes? Can you tunnel itunes over VPN?

http://ourtunes.sourceforge.net/

4) Why am I not seeing any hosts? Is the whole internet dead?
There probably aren't any people on your network sharing iTunes music. ourTunes only allows you to view connections within your networks "subnet"

5) Why can't I download songs from the internet?
ourTunes isn't that type of program. It's designed to only function within your local network.
posted by meehawl at 5:52 PM on November 15, 2005

I tunnel tunes over SSH from home to listen at work. You need a Rendezvous (Bonjour) transponder for the client machine. It works great, though.
posted by kindall at 9:11 PM on November 15, 2005

itunes is still LAN-only. however, you can get around this by using ssh to do port forwarding (forward remote port 3689 to some other port on your local machine), and then announcing a DAAP service on a different port on your machine with a rendezvous beacon. this is pretty much equivalent to what kindall is talking about.
posted by joeblough at 11:29 AM on November 16, 2005