How To: Listen to Your Music Anywhere
Apple’s iTunes offers a number of ways to listen to your music on various Apple devices, but what if you just want to stream some music to where ever you happen to be? For instance, you’re at work, you music collection is at home, what do you do?
There are number of things you can do, but one possible answer is to use the SlimServer software from Logitech. Although SlimServer was specifically written for use with the company’s companion hardware line of “Squeeze” devices, Logictech was kind enough to open source the server code.
Because the SlimServer software is open source, cross platform and free it makes a good music streaming solution regardless of what platform you choose to implement it on (SlimServer is supported on Windows, OS X and some Linux flavors, I’ve been running mine on an Ubuntu server with no problems).
Mac OS X Hints has a short guide for Mac users looking to set a SlimServer for anywhere access, but the process is essentially the same on all platforms. Just install the server and either install a startup item or add the SlimServer to your start up scripts. Then point SlimServer to your music collection and let it scan through (warning, if you collection is large this will take a while).
Now with your SlimServer running and your music available all you need to do if find out your IP address. Once you have that just point any browser, from any computer to http://0.0.0.0:9000 where the zeros are replaced with your host computer’s IP address.
If you want to get fancier you can point other media players like WinApp to http://1.2.3.4:9000/stream.mp3 and stream your music through the player rather than the browser.
Of course there are other ways to go about streaming your music (Hamachi comes to mind), but since this one uses the http protocol exclusively, it’s easier to get through those pesky corporate firewalls (note that you’ll need to configure your own firewall and router to let through outside http requests).
The other nice thing is that for local administration on your home network you can still use iTunes to manage your music, to sync your iPod, iPhone and Apple TV. Just tell SlimServer to use you iTunes XML file instead of pointing it to the music folder directly, that way whenever you update using iTunes, SlimServer has access to the added files.
[reminder via Lifehacker]
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