Streaming your iTunes Music the Easy Way

Cosmo Catalano December 10th, 2008

You may have seen a post on TUAW today, explaining how to stream your music collection across the Internet.  It’s useful, but—as it seems to me—needlessly laborious. Mac OS X and Expandrive make this functionality a snap.

One: Set up a computer at home with all your music on it.  Best bet is an old G3 iBook (cheap, low power consumption, battery backup in case of power outage) with OS 10.4.11 and a big external hard drive.

Two:  Go to the “Sharing” settings in System Preferences on that machine.  Turn on Remote Login if you want to use SFTP, if you don’t mind a slow insecure protocol, you can optionally turn on FTP Access.

settings1

Three:  Go to “Energy Saver” and set this computer to never sleep. Now take your primary laptop and go to the nearest coffee shop with free wifi.

sleep

Four: Order espresso. Open laptop. Download Expandrive.

Five: Open Expandrive. Enter your home IP adress, admin user name,  and password.  Path should be  “/Volumes/[external hard drive name]/”

drives

Six:  The hard drive will appear on your desktop. Open it and double-click your song files.

Seven:  Rock out with abandon. Drink espresso. Brag to friends.

A few other considerations:

  • If the computer you leave on at home connects to the internet through a router, you’ll need to set up port forwarding, so that port 22 [for SFTP] automatically redirects to your always-on computer.
  • If you make a second Expandrive connection to your stay-at-home computer over your local network (using its local address ) and add that music to iTunes ahead of time, your complete library will be available from remote locations as soon as you mount the drive on your desktop.
  • http://tuaw.com Mike

    Interesting approach — not really iTunes streaming though, as you have to open the music files individually. Aron’s setup allows your library & playlists to appear in iTunes as a shared library.

    There are several simpler ways of doing ‘real’ streaming, including the SimplifyMedia service and YazSoft’s ShareTool Bonjour extender, but Aron was trying to show the potential power of SSH tunnels in a creative way, not necessarily provide a best practice for iTunes across the WAN.

  • http://couplebits.com/ Eric Ellenberg

    Isn’t there some way you could use MacFUSE to mount the iTunes library as a drive on your computer at home, and then mount that drive remotely? That seems like it’d improve at least one part of the user experience (surfing your music instead of drilling through a labyrinth of folders with your music files in them).

  • http://blog.magnetk.com Cosmo Catalano

    As it says at the end of the post, adding the files to your iTunes playlist from your local network ahead of time creates the same user experience, playlists and all. There isn’t a single mp3 on my laptop hard drive, and you’d never know the difference.

    You could, in theory, add the whole library remotely for the same experience as well, but you’d be there a while.

  • Steve

    Yay for SSH :-)

    PS Isn’t the “Turn on FTP Access” step unnecessary if SFTP is being used (and only tcp/22 is being forwarded)?

  • http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mulvecom-Music-Discovery/115341501841088 fast music downloads

    Hm, decent article. Do you provide some kind of subscription system because I am unable to see it. Thanks Nick Mensin

Grab the RSS feed
Follow ExpanDrive on Twitter Follow us on Twitter


Try ExpanDrive

If you’ve heard of SSH then you need ExpanDrive.



Try Strongspace

Awesome SFTP/rsync online storage by ExpanDrive.