Sharing Music Between Computers

Sharing Music Between Computers

Hello, I’ve been working on sharing music between my 3 computers. One Mac, one Windows, one Linux. I’ve let my inner nerd fly his nerd flag!

Anyway, let me outline this situation. You want to host a party or family celebration. You’ve got the perfect music for it. The problem is that you keep your music on your Mac back in your bedroom. You keep your music on a separate external hard drive.

You don’t want to run a cable from your bedroom to the stereo in the living room. You’ve got house-wide Wi-Fi courtesy of your ISP’s router, though.

You do have a netbook available. It’s a cheap Windows XP netbook used for looking at cat videos on Youtube and it has built-in Wi-Fi.

The solution? Hurry up, download Pulptunes for Mac, and configure it.

Pulptunes is a Web server for iTunes. To configure it, you need to provide it with the location of your iTunes XML file, which you will find in your /iTunes folder. Pulptunes makes it easy and assumes you keep your iTunes library on Macintosh HD. If you don’t keep your iTunes library on Macintosh HD, though, it’s easy to direct Pulptunes to that library.

Even better is that Pulptunes incorporates a Flash-based Web player for MP3 and M4A files. Take that cheap netbook, open its Web browser to http://: (your ip address)15000 and you ‘ll see the Pulptunes player open up. All your music files in MP3 and M4A format are there, plus you’ve got all your playlists.

If you ripped Bing Crosby’s Christmas album for this occasion, you probably ripped it to M4A format.

Pulptunes has versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I would say that you’ll find the Mac and Windows versions most useful, because Pulptunes works hand in glove with iTunes. To make it work on Linux, you have to copy an iTunes.xml file and edit it. That’s a pain.

If you’re not into iTunes, try Sockso, a simple Java-based Web music server.