Old Mac: Sharing files with Windows & music player?

January 6, 2004 7:15 PM

I'm helping some friends of mine set up a small house network with a cable router. They have two PC's running XP and an Imac with 96MB RAM, OS 8.1.

I do not know much at all about Macintosh computers, and I couldn't find any info regarding the ability to see files on the network, cross platform. I basically want to have access to the music files on one of the PCs from the Imac.

And of course, Itunes won't work on OS 8.1. What kind of Mp3 player should I get?

posted by Keyser Soze to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Pre OS X, it isn't very easy. You might load Dave on the iMac. That basically puts windows networking on the Mac which is probably the best choice for that those systems and that set-up.
posted by willnot at 7:20 PM on January 6, 2004

Man, it looks like the latest version of dave requires OS 9 on the mac. I'm not sure if you can find an older version or not.
posted by willnot at 7:22 PM on January 6, 2004

Damn... I was looking for a free version. Any freeware ways to do this?
posted by Keyser Soze at 7:25 PM on January 6, 2004

Maybe FTP. I'm sure there must be a free FTP server out there. I know there are free clients and the Mac shouldn't have any problem with that.
posted by willnot at 7:29 PM on January 6, 2004

I have no knowledge of the quality of this, but it's free, so give it a shot. If not, Version Tracker is probably where you want to look for an alternate if you're going to be running software on the Mac.
posted by willnot at 7:31 PM on January 6, 2004

You might be better off helping your friends upgrade the iMac and installing OS X. Interconnecting OS X and Windows is ridiculously easy. OS X has a Samba client in it and unless I'm mistaken, you should be able to point iTunes on the iMac to a library on one of the PCs.
posted by JollyWanker at 7:33 PM on January 6, 2004

Yeah. Upgrade to OSX, share the folder with the songs on the PC, then mount that as a SMB share on the Mac.
posted by mrbill at 7:36 PM on January 6, 2004

I ended up doing exactly what JollyWanker suggests with my sister's computer. For $25 I found 256 MB of ram which makes it more than adequate to run OS X. (note you'll need to track down 168 pin, 100mhz dimms)

For music sharing I had it going with Samba for a while, but then itunes came out for windows with rendezvous sharing and all was right with the world.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:46 PM on January 6, 2004

They are dirt poor and wont want to upgrade anything on the Imac, but I am dowloading the OS 9.1 upgrade.
posted by Keyser Soze at 7:53 PM on January 6, 2004

Keyser Soze - you won't be able to use OS 9.1 with your iMac's current OS 8.1 - was that a typo? You'd have to buy, or stumble across OS 9.0 to use that OS 9.1 upgrade.

You can upgrade OS 8.1 to OS 8.6 for free though, I believe.
posted by troutfishing at 8:57 PM on January 6, 2004

If you're sticking with the free, file-sharing may not be a very winnable situation.
With XP, Microsoft eliminated support for old-skool AppleTalk file-sharing (which had been available as a free download for NT and Win2k). And OS 8 isn't going to have the MS-centric file-sharing support that OS X has.
PC MACLAN or DAVE may do the trick, but I'm not sure about OS 8 support in their current versions, and they aren't free.

If you just need access to the music, and don't mind running a web server on the XP machine, something like this (also not free, but you could probably find something similar that was if you searched around) may work.

Upgrading to OS 9 may make iTunes music sharing an option. You could probably find a used copy of OS 9 on the cheap.
posted by sad_otter at 10:51 PM on January 6, 2004

PC-Mac-Net FileShare Lite may be a useful solution for you. The 'lite' version is free and although it has a few limitations it still might offer enough to suit your needs. It works with OS 8.6 and above, and most flavours of Windows.
posted by harmless at 5:51 AM on January 7, 2004

NetJuke is similar to Andromeda, but free.
posted by O9scar at 10:43 AM on January 7, 2004

Doesn't XP have a personal web sharing feature? Couldn't you serve out the MP3s that way, and view them with a browser on the Mac?
posted by machaus at 2:13 PM on January 7, 2004

If all they'll want is just access to the music--in terms of listening to it (burning CDs won't work over the network)--then iTunes on both platforms with music-library sharing is definitely the way to go.

And as can be gathered from previous comments, you'd want to stick OS9 on there--it'll run fine with an iMac using 96MB RAM. You won't want OSX; it will run on the machine as currently configured, but by 'run' I mean 'crawl', and OS9 will more than do the trick while running much snappier--it'll run all their OS8 apps plus the key to the whole scheme, iTunes.

If you can't find a cheap OS9 disc on eBay (they're there!) I could probably 'accidentally' drop an ISO of MacOS 9.2.1 (full install CD) on my web server for you temporarily ;)
posted by cyrusdogstar at 2:58 PM on January 7, 2004

I think the itunes library sharing access is an OSX only feature on the mac side.
posted by machaus at 5:54 PM on January 7, 2004