Thursday, January 26, 2006

An Interesting Combo: Hamachi and ITunes Network Share

When I first heard about Hamachi a few weeks back I thought "that is really cool, but how can I use it?" The other day I was messing around with ITunes (which is also new to me because I finally broke down and got an IPOD) and the ITunes sharing music over a network feature, when it dawned on me that it might be able to use my Hamachi VPN between home and work. By the way, if you haven't tried Hamachi... simple as using an IM (instant messenger). Anyway, So I downloaded ITunes at work and installed it at work. There it was, my music share from home, and I didn't have to do anything! Cool, so now I can listen to any of my songs (or any audio and maybe video now) that I have on ITunes at home, anywhere I want.
That's all good but what if my home connection goes down while I'm away? I wanted to be able to have an actual copy of what wanted to listen to. Or say you have no morals and aren't squeamish and you want your buddy to have a copy. Or you really don't want ITunes on your other system. Well, there is a free, neat little JAVA standalone program called Ourtunes (OT44.jar) on sourceforge.net (currently version 1.33) which can see the share across the Hamachi network and allows you to play or download a copy of any song in any share it can see. Imagine getting all your poor buddies together, making a mini virtual private network with Hamachi and pooling your resources just like all those cool guys at the university. ;)
Me? I'm happy just to be able to listen to my music collection at work. I'm impressed because of the two corporate firewalls that thought would make something like that impossible.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In the hamachi "Getting Started Guide" there are instruction to setting up itunes so that music and other media files can be shared through Hamachi. LogMeIn owns Hamachi, and LogMeIn is wicked cool too...