Design Department

Windows only: Freeware application HFS (HTTP File Server) makes it dead simple to run a server to share files from your computer over the web. All you have to do is run the application on the computer with files you want to share, then selectively pick files or directories you want to allow access to. In addition, you can even upload files to your HFS server from elsewhere. You’ll need to set upport forwarding for port 80 on the computer running HFS and then either remember your public IP address (which may change) or assign a name to your home server (for free) so it’s easy to remember. HFS is freeware, Windows only, and weighs in at a svelte 550KB. HFS Advanced mode even supports user accounts.

Windows/Mac only: Freeware application ourTunes downloads music from any shared iTunes library on your network to any folder on your computer. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of ourTunes (or a similar app, myTunes) before, as it used to be the go-to app for sharing music with your peers using your iTunes library, but every time Apple updated iTunes, ourTunes would die another death. Well, it’s back, and it works with iTunes 7. I hadn’t used ourTunes in a while, and things seemed to be working differently, so to get you up and running, here’s how it works.

First you’ll want to download the ourTunes.jar file from the Save OurTunes web site. If it’s not already installed, you’ll also need to download and install Java on your computer.

Now fire up iTunes and ourTunes on your computer. Before you go any further, I’d recommend choosing a download folder for all that music you’re about to download. Done? Then let’s move ahead.

If there are other computers on your network, you’ll see them start popping up in the ourTunes (and iTunes, for that matter) sidebar. In ourTunes, click on the name of the library you want to download music from. ourTunes will work a little magic, creating a duplicate entry for this shared library in your iTunes sidebar. Click on the duplicate library in iTunes, let it load the library, and then you’re ready to go.

So how do you download songs? Easy—just play the song in iTunes and ourTunes will start sucking down the file to the folder you chose above. It downloads quickly, so you don’t have to listen to the entire song before moving to the next. Generally songs just take a few seconds to land on your desktop.