Way to share my music throughout the house/around campus?
 

I have my music collection completely ripped off to my harddrive and am looking for a way to share it. I would like to be able to listen to it at work, on different machines around the house, or even at a friends house. Right now I have a Winamp Shoutcast server setup and running, which, combined with a web control for Winamp works OK, but things could definitely be better. Is there any way to do this? What I would really like would be an access restricted way to just view the files--think Samba but without the "same username/password" caveat: and I cant use Samba anyways, because the music all resides on an NTFS formatted drive running on a windows box, and for many reasons, will remain that way.

Any ideas on an easy, effective, and access restricted way to do this?

itunes...shares across local networks. easiest by far.

otherwise, you might need to write a custom p2p client that only looks at certain IP addresses.

iTunes would be great, but Im pretty sure the machines have to be in the same subnet, which I know they won't always be--for instance when Im at work. I love the way it works, and thats pretty much what Im looking for, Im just not sure it will work :(

A bog standard ftp client like guild or caesar... set it up and people can type: ftp://yourip and gain access. If you want you can also restrict some files to people you want to give them to with usernames and passwords.

Way ahead of you there :) Tried that for a while, but I really just dont like having to download all the music to different computers given the crappy connection in my house. :(

Ive been playing around with iTunes some more, but cant even get the sharing to work. Grrr...

dude, have you tried turning up the volume? Ooooohhhhh, you mean you want to share the music files?

have you thought about/tried setting up a vpn? openVPN is what i use and have had an ok time running it. depending on connections speed you can stream the music from your remote location.

gotcha. you might think of ways of spoofing your IP. i'm not sure how Itunes checks, but it should be somewhat reasonable to fool it. then the problem you have is transfer rate.

set up a playlist in advance, and make it a streaming radio station. i don't think it's too hard to set up. you couldn't control what song came next, unless you had remote login. frankly, a portable hard drive may be the easy way out.