Posted on 08/27/2008
at 11:00 AM
Category: Technology
Posted by Tim
Wouldn’t it be great to share your music library with others in your house, apartment, dorm, or wherever else you may be? It’s easier than you think. There’s several different ways to do it, but I’m going to go over the easiest. Next week (or maybe later this week) I’ll post part 2, which will allow your listeners to add to your music library.
I’ve decided to use iTunes for this venture, mainly because I don’t know anyone who doesn’t own an iPod and iTunes makes sharing its library very easy. If you don’t have iTunes, mosey on over to apple.com and download it.
After the installation finishes, open iTunes. If your music library is already setup and ready to go, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. If not, it’s time to add some music. Before we do that, let’s tell iTunes how we want it to manage our music. In the menu bar at the top, click on Edit, then Preferences (on OS X, click iTunes, then Preferences). In the list of tabs, find Advanced and click it. In this dialog you’ll find the location of your iTunes library, which is where iTunes will keep all of your music files if told to do so, and a few other options.
The first checkbox, Keep iTunes Music folder organized should be checked by default. Enabling this option tells iTunes to keep its music folder organized by creating folders for each artist, then a subfolder for each album under that artist, and in this folder is where the songs for that album are stored. Remember though, this option only keeps files in the iTunes library folder organized. If the files you’re adding to your library aren’t actually in the iTunes library folder, iTunes won’t organize them. This is where the second checkbox comes in. By checking Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library, this tells iTunes to create copies of each file, then put those copies in the iTunes library (pretty self explanatory, huh?). However, what I’ve found that most people don’t realize is this option does exactly what it says it does; creates a copy of the files. So if you have mp3s on your desktop and add them to iTunes with this option enable, you’ve just created two copies of the same file, one on your desktop and one in your iTunes library. Remember to delete the original files after adding them to iTunes. If you don’t, you’ll waste a lot of disk space. I recommend enabling both of the top two checkboxes to save yourself a headache. Otherwise, your music collection will probably be scattered throughout your hard drive, making it difficult to find the files if ever needed and possibly wasting disk space if duplicates are made.
Now that iTunes is configured and ready to go, let’s tell it to share our library. In the Preferences dialog (In the Edit menu on Windows, iTunes menu on OS X), click on the Sharing tab. The first option, Look for shared libraries tells iTunes to look for other people’s shared music. The second, which is what we want, tells iTunes to share our music. Check Share my library on my local network. Now there’s a whole bunch of new options available. Our entire music library can be shared or only selected playlists. In my example, I decided to share my entire library. Now we need to name our shared library. Under the General tab towards the bottom of the dialog you’ll see a text box labeled Shared Name. Enter something meaningful here. When you’re done, click OK.
iTunes also gives us the ability to password protect our library so only select listeners can access our music. This option is found at the bottom of the Share tab. To listen to your newly shared music collection on another computer, open iTunes on that machine and your shared library should automatically pop up on the left. If it doesn’t, make sure iTunes has been told to look for shared libraries (in the Preferences dialog under Sharing, as discussed above).
Please remember, iTunes cannot share your library if it’s not running. Make sure it’s open. Next week I’ll be going over other ways to share your music library and how listeners can add music to your collection.
|
|
