How to share your iTunes library over the Internet

Posted on December 25, 2008 at 5:47 am

If you are a big iTunes user due to your iPod or iPhone, then there may come a time when you would want to share the songs in your library with friends and family across the Internet.

Or maybe you know a friend who has an awesome collection of classical music in their iTunes library, so instead of finding and downloading them yourself, it would be nice if you could just browse and download their iTunes library.

Mojo is cool application for Mac and Windows that allows you to share any song from your iTunes library and download any song from a friends’ library. It’s also safer than downloading music using bittorrent sites and peer-to-peer programs.

Once you download the program, you’ll need to create an account. After you create an account with Mojo, you’ll be able to start adding buddies to your buddy list on the left hand side. Note that your friends also need to download, install, and create an account with Mojo.

Once you add a friend and they approve you, you’ll have full access to their iTunes library. Now to start browsing their music collection and downloading songs, just double click on a buddies name. A window will pop up with a list of all their songs, playlists, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audio books, and everything else.

To download a song to your iTunes library, just click on the small down arrow next to each song, video, etc, or the Download button at the bottom right. The program will also create a new playlist with all of the songs that you download from a particular friend.

If you don’t want to download the song, video, etc, you can just double-click on it and listen to it or play it. Also, the cool thing about the program is it will automatically detect whether a song in a friends’ library is already in your library and will highlight those in grey, so you don’t download it again.

Also, you might be wondering about all those DRM songs, right? Can you just download those from someone else? Nope! Any songs that have DRM will be highlighted in red, like above, which cannot be downloaded, but can be listened to.

Mojo is a free application, but it has some limitations. The free version only has a license for three, which means that you can have only 2 buddies to share your iTunes library with. For a small one time price, you can have unlimited friends and also subscribe to playlists in your friends’ library.

There is also another program, an open source one called OurTunes, that also allows you to share your iTunes collection with others, although it’s not as cool looking and robust. The developer, though, has been consistently releasing new versions of the program, so it’s a good alternative to Mojo. Enjoy!

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads