Tech Blog

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If you prefer to use iTunes as your music player, and have your entire collection sitting on the app, you might be interested in being able to listen to all those tunes from any other computer without actually transferring anything. With just a few clicks in under five minutes of your time, you can make that happen.

The Web application that can do this for you is pulpTunes , a cool iTunes Web server that offers up your entire library on a silver platter onto any browser. All you need to do is to download an XML file of your library. Go to File>Library on iTunes and choose Export Library to download the file. You can also opt to do this with specific playlists as well. Upload it to pulpTunes and you're ready to begin.

Initially, pulpTunes will only work within your home network, which could be a great feature if you’re using a netbook with little empty hard drive space. But the key to pulpTunes is to make it work remotely, so you can access your playlists online from any computer in the world with Internet access. When launching the app on your Mac, PC or Linux machine, a pop-up window will tell you what you need to do to open up the right port to let pulpTunes get through for remote access. It should do this automatically under the Advanced Settings option.

Once you get it working, which shouldn’t take long at all, you might want to go to User Management and choose a username and password to protect yourself, since anyone could log in if they knew your IP address. Also, you don’t need to keep any other computers on at home if you want to access remotely. The pulpTunes servers take care of all that for you.

Oh, and before I forget, one extra bonus to pulpTunes is that it actually lets you download any of the tracks you have, except for any that have DRM attached to them. You can only play or download tracks that are in MP3 or AAC format, so no luck on any WAV tracks that you might have.

And there you have it. You should be up and running in no time, enjoying music that you don’t have to copy over to another hard drive.