The Dorm is Alive With the Sound of Shared Music

The college dorm is about as close to communal living as many of us ever come. An important part of that experience is sharing the music. Some colleges and universities have demonstrated a forward-thinking sensibility by contracting with online music services to keep their students awash in legal music while they're registered students. In 2003, Penn State University became the first school to offer students free music. It licensed Napster and other schools followed suit. Today one network making the news is Ruckus, a free service to anyone with a valid .edu email.

But the most common way to share music is sharing iTunes music. iTunes has a sharing feature that lets you do two things. It opens your music library to others who are on the same LAN network (wired or wireless) and it lets you listen to music on other computers running iTunes.

iLounge does a great step-by-step tutorial on how to share your music and connect to others' iTunes libraries. The short form is to look for the link Shared Music that lets your computer look on the network to see if any other iTunes libraries are available. Another one, called Share My Music, lets you make your music available to anyone connected to the LAN.

With these, anyone connected to the LAN who is using iTunes will be able to display the shared libraries in a directory-like structure (see the iLounge screen shot). There are lots of nuances to sharing music that you can learn about by reading the article. Apple's technical document details how to configure firewalls to work with sharing. For a bit more on how sharing works read the post at Low End Mac.

Sharing's Limits
One of many caveats? iTunes shared libraries do not let you share music purchased from the iTunes music store (these are protected by Apple's proprietary rights management). What you can share are MP3 files that you've downloaded or music ripped from CDs. There are other limits, too, including the fact that you can't copy or download the music you share. And it can't become part of your playlists.

New Tools
A cottage industry of iTunes enhanced music sharing programs is cropping up. One of the most high profile ones is a sharing program called OurTunes. Developed by Stanford University students, it allows users to connect to a local area network, find and download songs off of iTunes, and share (but not download) music on other people's iTunes. Because OurTunes creates a network of people on a LAN it's safer than networks like Kazaa and Napster which aren't constrained by location. On campus, most LANs are often confined to a single dorm.

SharePod is a program that lets you bypass the PC and share music directly from your iPods (a Zune imitator).

Remember that the purpose of sharing tools is to let friends share music legally. Happy listening.