- Browsing Through Your Library
- Searching for Songs
- Sorting Songs
- Playing and Pausing Songs
- Moving Around in a Song
- Options for Playing Multiple Songs
- Accessing and Playing Podcasts
- Controlling Volume
- Listening to Radio Streams
- Viewing Artwork
- Accessing and Playing Video
- Rating Songs
- Sharing Your Music
- Playing Music from Others' Libraries
- Dealing with Firewalls
Sharing Your Music
iTunes lets you do more than just listen to your favorite songs. You can actually share your iTunes music library over a small local network. This might mean your home, a small business, or a segment of a large corporate network (otherwise known as a subnet). Sharing over a network is an easy way for family members or office mates to listen to your music collection.
If you want to make your music available to others on your network, you need to enable sharing in iTunes.
To turn on sharing:
- Open your Preferences window and click the Sharing tab.
- In the Sharing tab, click to check "Share my music" (
Figure 3.46
).
Figure 3.46 The Sharing tab of the Preferences window.
- If you want to share only selected playlists, select "Share selected playlists," and then check the playlists you want to share.
- If you want to change the way your shared music is listed when it appears in someone else's Source pane, type the name you prefer in the "Shared name" field.
- If you want people to have to type a password before they can connect to your library, select "Require password" and type a password.
- Click OK to close the Preferences window and save your settings.
Once you turn on sharing, all computers on your local area network—or on your subnet if you're part of a large network—can see an item from your shared library in their iTunes Source pane. (See "Playing Music from Others' Libraries" next in this chapter.)
To turn off sharing:
- In your Preferences window, in the Sharing tab (refer to Figure 3.46), uncheck "Share my music."