Share Music on a Network Drive

Task #90

Difficulty Level 2

To share music with another Mac on your network, you can mount a shared drive on that Mac using the Finder. After you have the drive mounted, it acts like any other drive on your machine. Add music to your iTunes Library as you normally would, but use the networked drive instead.

The benefit of this method versus the automatic sharing in iTunes is flexibility. By sharing music on a shared drive, you can add items on the remote computer to your own playlists. You can also edit information about a song, such as its title and artist.

To begin playing music, choose the song that you want to hear and click the Play button. On an ethernet network, iTunes streams the audio perfectly. In fact, iTunes is so good at streaming that you can even use an old Mac as a music server. Even though the old Mac may not support the latest version of OS X, if it can support an HFS+ drive (Mac OS 8 and later), you can use it with your slick Panther machine.

Caution

Do not rely on the speed of network traffic when burning a CD in iTunes. Although it is technically possible to burn a CD using files over the network, you cannot always guarantee that a network is going to behave as fast as possible. Therefore, it is a good idea to copy files from remote computers to your Mac before trying to burn them to a CD. By using local files, you can avoid problems with burned disks. This can also accelerate the burning process.

Did You Know?

Sharing music with another computer is fun, but sharing music with two computers is twice as fun. As your music collection grows and your available hard drive space decreases, you can store files on other computers on the network.