A New Way to Stream…

I discovered that I can stream my home iTunes music to myself while at work… I’ve previously mentioned the SliMP3 which I still love and use both at home and on the go, but today I discovered I can stream my existing iTunes library.

A bit about the home setup…Our home iMac is set up to handle some sharing tasks so I can serve the occasional web page and share the external firewire drives we have connected. That connects over Airport which is then connected to a Linksys router. Our net connection is a cable modem.

There are two users on the iMac (me and my wife) and I set up a symbolic link from the usual location for iTunes music – ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music to an external Firewire drive. This allows each user to import music and for the other to automatically see that new music when iTunes is open on either account. There did not seem to be a way for this to work any other way. We have way too much music for me to carry it around on my laptop so I have a copy of the iTunes Library on my PowerBook which also refers back to the external firewire drive. This allows me to mount the home machine and drives and have access to stuff when I want on my laptop. It also allows my iPod to sync over the home network, something I rarely do since it takes much longer that simply connecting to the home computer.

Anyway…quite a bit of background to get to today. I used AFP (Apple File Protocol) to connect to my home system. I use a dynamic dns service (no-ip.org) which makes this easier that having to recall what your IP number is assuming it changes. Once the usual drives are connected I can open use my iTunes library as I would normally expect to… all my music is available and can easily stream.

Not sure why I did not try this earlier… it totally works! There is the occasional hiccup as to be expected in any streaming situation, but for the most part completely enables my music on the go.

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