iTunes 4, Streaming Server

Seeing as I’ve missed the boat on pon­tif­i­cat­ing about the world-​shattering ram­i­fi­ca­tions of iTunes 4 and the imple­men­ta­tion of the inte­grated music shop (if you happen to live in the US) I’ll just note what is, for me, the best new fea­ture, and one that hasn’t been get­ting the atten­tion it deserves: stream­ing over the internet.

To turn your copy of iTunes into a stream­ing music server, open the Shar­ing pane in Pref­er­ences and check the Share my music button, or choose some Playlists to share. If you are behind a fire­wall, be sure to open up port 3689. You can then control-​click on a given playlist to find it’s Shar­ing URL, or dis­trib­ute your IP address to friends to allow them access to all your music files. The number of con­nected users is dis­played at the bottom of the Shar­ing pane.

To access a friend’s files in turn, choose ‘Connect to Shared Music’ from the Advanced tool­bar menu and enter a friend’s IP address.

It’s as simple as that and, on a local net­work with Ren­dezvous, sim­pler still.

The one hitch is the fact that most folk don’t have a static IP address, so I’m in the process of work­ing out how to make a page to list the cur­rent IPs of my iTunes chums. Doubt­less the Lazy­web will beat me to it, or pro­vide a more ele­gant solu­tion than mine.

In the mean­time, if you’re hungry for more com­ment, analy­sis and bull­shit about the new Apple prod­ucts, try these sites:

1. Todd Dominey on the neat inte­gra­tion of the music store.
2. Signal vs. Noise have a improve­ments in mind
3. Steven F.’s first impres­sions, and a brain­wave con­cern­ing the dis­cov­ery of like-​minded music fans
4. Daring Fire­ball get a little technical

That’s enough drop ‘n’ drag­gage from Net­NewsWire for now, but I’ll update this post as new wid­gets and ideas emerge.

Posted at 1pm on 01/05/03 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us