Download songs with ourTunes

I guess ourTunes is a very popular application in Universities and IT departments. It basically lets you download songs from other peoples iTunes if they are in the same network and share their itunes library. I'm not in a network and don't use iTunes at all so I can't test how effective this method is compared to using ftp, network browsing or local copies but I guess some will like it because it is easy to use.

There is a good tutorial that explains all the steps to get this Java program to work at the save ourtunes forum. You have to download the newest ourTunes version, start iTunes first then ourTunes afterwards.

A list of shared libraries should become visible. Selecting a library in ourTunes loads that library in the iTunes sidebar and you can start listening to songs. Listening will actually download the songs which you have selected and you can speed up the process by pausing the stream. It takes a while to get the feeling for this but downloads should not take that long at all.

This is probably not a perfect way to trade large amounts of songs but it's nice for music discovery. Oh and well, it's Java so it should work on many operating systems.

Update: Ourtunes is no longer available. The Sourceforge domain the project was hosted on returns a 404 not found error when you try to load it. It is not clear why it has been pulled from the site. I'm not aware of an alternative that you can use, other than sharing songs via ftp or network shares directly.

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