tunesatwork: Nice Idea, Too Bad It Doesnt Work
One of the things I miss in iTunes, a feature that was there for about a week, was the ability to listen to my music collection over the web. I wasnt interested in the then hacked-in ability to then download music from my (and I other peoples music) because, as Apple tells us, Dont Steal Music. I just enjoyed being able to listen to any of the music I couldnt fit on my iPod at work.
tunesatwork promises to deliver this feature right back to iTunes users. tunesatwork is a server that you install on your Mac at home. You need to make sure you open up ports number 12777 both within the Apple Sharing menu. Do this by clicking the firewall tab, hitting new, and entering in port 12777 as the port number. If you have a router you also need to open up the port in your router to the machine where you are going to run the server. So now that your ports are all open you are ready to boot up tunesatwork.
After you boot it up tunesatwork asks you to locate your iTunes library and then your iTunes music folder. Once you do this the application begins processing all your songs which, depending on your collection, can be slow-going.
Now, go to work (or a friends house, wherever!) and open up a web browser. You need to make sure you have the latest version of Java on the machine. Enter the url that tunesatwork spat out for you on your home machine and, voila, there is all your music.
Sort of. This is where the dream kind of falls apart. I have a rather large music collection so I may be the exception (over 20k songs) but tunesatwork would not load my songs. The albums showed up as did the categories but no songs after 5 minutes, ten minutes, then an hour.
Im willing to give the developers the benefit of the doubt, it is a new release and it is also a great idea. I just wish that Apple could provide this feature into iTunes. I wouldnt even care if they limited it to only one stream if they are concerned about piracy. After all, its my music, I should be able to listen to it when and where I want. Anyone out there get tunesatwork working?
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Comments
this sounds like an awesome application. I will try this as soon as I can head home to install it on my music computer at home.
There is one thing in the faq - it says its only been tested using 10.2 - if you are using 10.3 it may make break it.
It definitely looks as if its 10.3 that is the reason Tunesatwork will not install properly. He/They developed and tested exclusively on 10.2.
I looked a bit more for other solutions and found a slick looking: Slimp3 Server/Player http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_features.html
Like Tunesatwork (or should it be tunes at home, since your digital tunes actually reside at home?) the Slimp3 Server is installed on the machine that has all your music. Then you do some IP voodoo (port forwarding if you have router, and port opening if you have a firewall) and bang you have a online streaming music server.
Its that easy to have a music station. Slightly more enthusiastic people could probably even get their new internet music station via SIRIUS in their auto.
But again - it just don’t work!! heh heh, before you break down and wonder why centralizing your music library should be so difficult - it boils down to one thing (for me) I am a DSL user with a service provider that uses dynamic IPs. I would need to get a static IP to be able to be a music serving wunderkind.
Anyone with insight on the feasibility of using a dynamic IP service provider with music server software: please post!!
Does this really need to be posted here? I would think your comments should reside on MacUpdate or something.