Share and stream music from iTunes over the Internet for free

Posted on December 4, 2007 at 2:52 pm

Everyone loves listening to music, right? Unfortunately, everyone does not have every song in their local music collection and having to download a song illegally from a peer-to-peer network is simply too risky. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could share out your iTunes music collection with your friends and family by streaming it to their computer and vice versa?

Simplify Media is a free program for Windows and Mac that has some pretty nice sharing features. The program works with both iTunes and Winamp and allows you to play songs from others directly within iTunes itself, as a separate playlist.

iTunes has a built-in sharing feature already, but it only works with people on the same network. Using Simplify Media, you can play songs from other people’s playlists that are outside of your own network.

Winamp also has a sharing feature, but your friends have to go to a special web page and play the music from there. Simplify Media will create a shared playlist within Winamp itself.

Also, another advantage to Simplify Media is that users can access the music of another user if they are running the program, whereas this is not true for iTunes and Winamp. In iTunes or Winamp, when you share music, you cannot access the music of another person unless they share it also.

Of course, using Simplify Media does not mean anyone can stream music from your computer. You choose the group of friends that you want to share with and no one else can see any files.

The other advantage to Simplify Media is that you can transparently access music from a Mac while on a PC and vice versa. The software handles all of the communication and therefore makes it very simple to stream music from one OS to another without any issues.

You can invite as many people as you want to listen to your music, but this also means your computer will be using up more resources as it has to stream the music to more people. So be a little careful how you share your collection since your computer will be acting as a server.

Once installed, you should be prompted by Windows to allow the program to access the Internet and therefore open a port in the firewall. You really don’t have to do anything else to configure the connection. If you’re behind a proxy server, you may have some issues connecting.

Finally, the company states this is legal because you are sharing music between people and there is no actual downloading occurring. Whether the music was illegally downloaded before you use Simplify Media does not really matter since it was illegal to download it not stream it.

You can also use Simplify Media to just listen to your own music collection while you’re not at home. This program is really cool and within 15 minutes, you can share out thousands of songs to anyone in the world. Hopefully, in the next version they will support more media players, like Windows Media player, GOM player, etc.

Technorati Tags: share itunes music, share winamp music, share music online, free music share, share music downloads, music share programs, share music library

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

2 Responses to “Share and stream music from iTunes over the Internet for free”

ram said on : December 5th, 2007 at 5:55 am

This is nice, i will try this

» Thanks! Says:

[...] log in, and forget.” Bored Internet: “Inviting friends could not be easier. ” Online Tech Tips: “makes it very simple to stream music from one OS to another” Back and Forth Forever: [...]
December 10th, 2007 at 1:19 pm