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I'm working on a full report of the new apple music service, as well as iTunes 4.
This afternoon I've been trying to get iTunes to share music over the net. This is the cool new ability in iTunes 4. Apple calls it rendezvous, but that is just the apple branding of the open source project zero conf. This aims at establishing networks of computers with zero configuration. In other words, if networks are possible (over ethernet or over wi-fi or whatever) they will just be established automagically. No fussing with IP addresses or any other networking arcana.
And it actually works. Or pretty much. Machines running iTunes 4 on our office ethernet indeed connect to each other, and music on any one computer shows up as a seperate play list in the iTunes jukebox on every other computer. So I can play music off any other machine in the office, and anyone can play music off my machine. Very slick.
But I should also be able to do this over the internet! That is the real amazing thing. But I could only sort of get that to work. iTunes can see my dial up machine from the office over the internet, but I can't see the office from my dial up machine. No doubt this has to do with the router and switch my office machine is sitting behind. So the afternoon was filled with lots of reading about router configuration and port forwarding. But so far to no avail. I'll try some more tomorrow.