To share iTunes music between two computers over the internet.
Problem:
- You have music in iTunes on your desktop at home.
- You want to listen to your home music on your laptop at work.
Solution:
- Download Zerospan (http://zerospan.org) on both computers. Drag the application to your Applications directory.
Before you begin...
- Zerospan is a network application. You need to have a username to identify each of your computers.
- We recommend that you use your email address followed by "-server" or "-laptop". For example, if your email address is billg@microsoft.com you would enter billg@microsoft.com-server on your server.
- Decide on a username for your server and your laptop.
On your desktop...
- Run Zerospan on your desktop computer.
- You will be prompted to enter a username for this computer.
- Enter your server's username that you picked above.
- From the User menu choose Add User.
- Enter your laptop's username that you decided on earlier and click the Add User button.
- You should see a list of names, which correspond to the cards in your Address Book.
- Find the entry for your laptop and select it.
- Click the "Allow to connect" button. You should see a checkbox appear in the "Allow" column next to the name in the list.
- Make sure you are running iTunes and have told it to share your music library. For help on how to set up iTunes for sharing, see (this page).
On your laptop...
- Run Zerospan on your laptop computer.
- You will be prompted to enter a username for this computer.
- Enter your laptop's username that you picked above.
- From the User menu choose Add User.
- Enter your server's username that you decided on earlier and click the Add User button.
- You should see a list of names, which correspond to the cards in your Address Book.
Running Zerospan
- Make sure Zerospan is still running on the desktop, and that the work laptop is marked as "Allowed to connect"
- Make sure iTunes is still running on the desktop, and that it is configured for sharing.
- Make sure Zerospan is running on the laptop.
- You should see a list of names, which correspond to the cards in your Address Book and users that you have added.
- Find the name that corresponds to your desktop computer (something like "billg@microsoft.com-server") and select it.
- Click the connect button.
- At this point, Zerospan will attempt to find and connect to your desktop computer. This may take a few minutes, during which you will see various weird status messages.
- If the connection succeeds, the text on the side of the list will read Connected, and the button will change its label to "Disconnect" - don't click that button until you're done using iTunes, though.
- If you encountered an error, see TroubleshootingZerospan?.
Sharing your music
- Congratulations, your two computers are now bridged with Zerospan.
- Open iTunes on your laptop. You should see an entry for your desktop computer in the sources list, and be able to play music from it as normal.
