iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Playing Songs Across a Network

If you’ve taken the trouble to set up a home network so your family can share a printer, an Internet connection, and so on, more treats await. With iTunes, you can share songs and playlists with up to five networked computers—Macs, PCs, or a mix of both. You could, for example, tap into your roommate’s jazz collection without getting up from your desk, and she can sample the zydeco and tejano tunes from your World Beat playlists. The music you decide to share is streamed over the network to the other computer.

Figure 5-28. The Print dialog box gently guides you though making a CD jewel-case insert (top), just printing out a basic list of songs (middle), or creating a catalog listing of all the albums on a mix (bottom). In Mac OS X, you can also fax a copy of your document to someone (click the Print button to get to the Mac’s built-in fax option).

Note

In iTunes 4.0, you could even listen to music on Macs elsewhere on the Internet, as long as you knew their IP addresses (network addresses). It didn’t take long for people to figure out how to exploit this feature and share music all over the Internet in sneaky ways that Apple had never intended.

In response to hysterical phone calls from the record companies, Apple removed this feature (and the Advanced → Connect to Shared Music command) in version 4.0.1. Now you can connect only to other machines on your ...