I just ran across a pretty cool program, Simplify Media. It fills a great need to share your iTunes library, not just on a local network, but across the net. I’ve actually had a solution for this for a while with Slim Server. But that takes installing the server, opening up a port on your router and forwarding it to the correct ip address of the computer the server is on, knowing your static ip, or setting up a dynamic domain with dyndns, and then managing your library via a web interface. Not the smoothest of experiences. The upside is that you can then access your library from any computer on the net, as long as you know the address.
Simplify Media is a program you install on both the computer your library is on, and the computer you want to listen on. When you log in on both, your shared library shows up right in iTunes on the client computer, just like a shared library on a local network. So, this has the downside of needing to install software on both computers, but overall it’s about 100 times easier to both install and use.
Furthermore, you can not only share your own music with yourself, but you can share your library with up to 30 other friends. You just send them an invitation, and when they accept and install the software, they can access your library from anywhere. Of course, you can always remove them from your shared users list as well.
I’m curious how legal this is. The company says it’s totally legal because you are just sharing with a small group of family / friends. I don’t know, but I’m not going to complain.
Oh, just realized I didn’t mention it. The program is freeware, and works on pc and Mac. So enjoy!