Rendezvous Streaming

In November 2001 I had just migrated from BeOS to OS X and was sorely missing the ability of my MP3 player to broadcast my home collection to work (see iTunes Needs Streaming). All the hubbub surrounding the new iTunes music store has eclipsed the news that it’s finally possible to do exactly that. I’m sitting at work right now listening to my home MP3s, and haven’t dropped a frame in two hours. All 16,000 tracks are immediately available, with all the usual search functionality. All my playlists (both standard and “smart”) are available. I’m in hog heaven.

If you set sharing on in the prefs, you can also provide a direct link into any point in your collection — Cmd-Click and select Copy URL. philm points out that it’s also possible to link to specific items in the iTunes store. Check these examples.

8 Replies to “Rendezvous Streaming”

  1. I wish I had more than 1 mac, so I could do this too…. Njoy the goodness. Saw that iTunes is coming to windows, bet they won’t get this feature.

  2. It’s Ctrl-Click and select Copy URL actually Scot. Waldo, I’m pretty sure iTunes for windows will have the feature, recent OS X updates have all improved Mac-PC-Mac sharing.

    I’m only on a 256/128 ADSL connection here so I am dropping frames listening to tracks encoded at 256. Another good case for AAC over MP3.

  3. Scot
    Does iTunes4 handle large amounts of music better than V3? I know you have a ton songs and had reported iTunes3 was slow this way. Also, I have noticed that when listening to songs over Rendezvous, the playcount on the hosting machine doesn’t get updated – only when you play them on that machine directly. Anyone know of a way to alter this behaviour?

    shayne

  4. It does seem happier with a large library. Deleting a track only takes about two seconds now – could be up to 10 or 15 seconds with v3.

    Play count doesn’t incremement probably for the same reason you can’t rate remote songs. No write capability whatsoever. So I doubt the behavior can be altered.

  5. I just came across this freshly updated Knowledgebase Article: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61585

    TITLE
    iTunes: How to Overcome 32 000 Song Library Size Limitation

    TOPIC

    iTunes 2 music libraries are limited to 32 000 songs. You can overcome this limitation by creating multiple libraries.

    DISCUSSION

    Note: iTunes 4 no longer has this limitation. See for information on updating to iTunes 4. http://www.apple.com/itunes/

    A single iTunes 2 music library can hold 32 000 songs. To accommodate more songs, you can create additional music libraries. Follow these steps;

    [snip]

    A hassle it seems, but interesting to discover there was indeed a limit.

  6. Well, I was only at half that but had already hit performance limits. Fortunately they seem to have cleared up quite a bit with iTunes 4. e.g. my iTunes library shows up immediately in iDVD 3, rather than couple of minutes it took with iTunes 3.

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