I have tons of mp3’s. Some were bought online, others I ripped from my (legally owned) CD collection and I want to listen to them at work.
Now, I suppose I could bring my entire collection in a few DVD’s, but I’m nto sure the office has DVD players, and I would rather not take up 10 gigs worth of space on ym hardrive.
I DO have an internet connection though and I thought that it must be possible for me to somehow access them directly (not just copy them over to the local office drive I’d rather not have complete unfettered acces to my computer through unsecured lines).
Is there any software (free or commercially available) that would allow me to do this?
Slimserver does this as well. It’s free, and it works ok.
I’m not familiar with the other two products, but this one allows username/password security, you can set up playlists over HTML by browsing your entire music directory, and, and I think this is the coolest feature, it supports downsampling of your music on the fly. Basically, if it keeps stopping to buffer (because your connection isn’t fast enough), you can tell it to resample the music at 96 or 64 or whatever kbps before it sends it to you. Helps out a lot.
It was fairly easy to set up as well, even behind a router.
If security is a concern to you, you should be careful about the server programs you run on your computer. Now, it’s usually more of a theoretical worry than a practical one, so you can decide if the risk is worth it to you.
On the othe rhand, if you only have around 10 gigs of music, have you considered an external USB hard drive? You should be able to find one for under $100 these days and you can use it to ferry files between home and work. They’re easy to use, too: If you have Windows XP on both machines, just plug one into any open USB port and the drive will show up and your files will be ready.
Or if you don’t care about money, what about a hard drive MP3 player (iPod, etc.)? Many of them can easily hold 10 gigs and some can double as portable hard drives as well. You could listen to your music at home, at work, and anywhere else you want.
If you’re a hardcore music junkie, the mini-hard-drive players are the only way to go.
Alternately you don’t need a webcasting program at all, just an FTP program like FileZilla Server running. It’s free and open-source, available on Sourceforge. It’s not “unsecured access” because you can set the account up on any port you want, and with a username and password and with read-only priveledges. You’d still be copying them to the local computer, but you could erase them at the end of the day.
…Although I admit, the “Slimserver” feature of resampling on the fly sounds pretty nice. Especially if you have ripped your music at a higher bit-rate than what is practical to stream over whatever-speed connection you are getting any particular day.
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