Thursday, February 01, 2007

Stream Your Itunes Music Collection



I recently came across a nice little program called MyTunesRSS





This program runs a service on your PC with Itunes that allows you to access your DRM-free itunes music and video collection over your network or even over the internet using a web browser. Using this program, you can view your by playlist, genre, artist or album. You can also create new playlists within the MyTunesRSS browser. MyTunesRSS, was developed by Codewave Software. And is completely free.

You can download tracks or play them right from your web browser or within your music player on your pc.

This is a really impressive piece of software that is free and requires very little setup. Its easy to use and doesn't require many resources on your server PC. Give it a try here



How to set MyTunesRSS up to stream to your networked PC or across the internet:

Requirements:
Windows XP or Mac OS X
Java Runtime 1.5 or Above Installed
Connection to a network and/or internet
Apple iTunes v6.0.4 or Above Installed
Music and/or Videos In The iTunes Library that are DRM-free

Procedure (note this is for windows, but you can install this on a Mac also):

  1. Download the latest version of MyTunesRSS to the computer where your Itunes library is. The download can be found here
  2. Unzip the contents into a new folder and select the MyTunesRSS Icon and wait for it to start up
  3. Under General-iTunes, browse to the location of your “iTunes Music Library.xml” (This file is typically located in your My Documents-My Music-iTunes folder)
  4. Choose the port number you will use to stream (eg. “8888″) and enter a password. You will use this port number and password to log in via the your web browser on the network (or even over the internet if you set up your router properly)
  5. Under Options-Automation, put a check under "Auto Update Database"
  6. Now you can open a web browser and enter either http://YOURIPADDRESS:[port number] ( for example http://localhost:8888 or http://192.168.1.1:8888) assuming 192.168.1.1 is your ip.
  7. Now enter your password and within your local network that's it - You should now see the MyTunesRSS screen

There are additional steps if you want to be able to access this over the internet outside of your local network. To do this, you need to port forward the port you selected in the steps above (8888 in this example) on your router. Then you would need to determine your home's IP address (you can find your IP by going here: http://www.whatismyip.org/ if you aren't sure). After that, you can access the program over the internet by changing the IP mentioned above with your home IP address. That's it.

If you like the software, they accept donations via paypal here. I think its a very usefull program so give it a try. I think you'll like it.

Currently the software requires you have itunes and set up your songs and playlists via Itunes. The software doesn't require Itunes to be open and running, but it uses the itunes database to run. In the current beta 3.0 version Itunes is an option, but isn't required meaning those who don't use itunes, but still want to stream music through this program could still use it. There are many other enhancements in the beta also so it should be exciting to see the 3.0 version once it's released.