Now that I’m working in an office setting, after spending a year or so in the kitchen of my house doing contract work, I see that some of my office mates have their music libraries available on the network. Nice, lets me listen to their tunes and learn more about their musical tastes too. I’d like to share my own music library on my Mac too: how do I do that?
Sounds like you’re well on your way to get a “plays well with others” on your first job evaluation. Nice!
Now before you do share your music, you might want to think about one thing: if you have offbeat taste in music, lots of songs with explicit lyrics, etc, you might first ask yourself whether it’s the image you want to convey in your workplace. Might not matter, but if you listen to thrash acid and work in a staid corporate environment, they might not appreciate your particular musical tastes.
Assuming you just wanna “let it all hang out”, however, here’s how you share your iTunes music…
Launch iTunes, and go to iTunes –> Preferences. On the top of that window you’ll see:
Click on the “Sharing” button and you’ll see all your options:
You’ll definitely want to choose “Share my library on my local network”, as I have done. If you want, select specific playlists or types of material to share (I only share music, not my other iTunes data, for example). Paranoid? Set a password too!
Click “OK”
Yeah, yeah, you aren’t intending to be a music publishing service for the local college, so you can just skip past that one and keep moving…
Now you won’t see anything different, but other people on the network will see you show up in the “Shared” section, and if they choose your library, they’ll see all your tunes – and be able to listen to them – as you can see here:
Nice and simple.
This is great–now I can share my 2 Live Crew and Andrew Dice Clay recordings with the whole office!