Yale Daily News: Yalies Share Music The iTunes Way

i Tunes and iTunes Music Store (iTMS) are media hits and are very popular among Mac and Windows users who want to take part in the Digital Music Download Revolution, but want to do it legally. In high schools and colleges, however, places were digital music distribution is an activity second only to partying, Appleis music-for-money is not as popular for a variety of reasons, some valid, some silly. There is at least one university, however, where iTunes has caught on.

The Yale Daily News has published a story of how iTunes is popular among iYaliesi as a means of creating numerous LAN based iradio stationsi using the music sharing feature of Appleis music player. The music library, or a subset of it via a playlist, of an iTunes users can be isharedi with other iTunes users who are on the same Local Area Network (LAN). This feature, in effect, gives iTunes users access to thousands of songs which they can play ilegallyi on their Macs or Windows.

From the Yale Daily News article, iTunes offers legal isharingi:

iTunes allows users to connect to other iTunes users on the same network and listen to their iTunes music collections. iTunes network sharing has become particularly successful on Yaleis campus. Students can listen to anyoneis music in the their immediate vicinity, provided that the user has elected to turn on the library sharing feature. But unlike Kazaa and Napster, iTunes sharing does not permit the actual downloading of files. Users can only listen, as though each student is running a radio station, but one that lets listeners choose which songs are broadcast.

Keith Salas i07, who is a new iTunes user, and he said he is a fan of the network-sharing feature.

"It is the most amazing program I have ever seen," Salas said. "It is all right there with the click of a button. You can listen to everyoneis music, with pretty good variety."

Read the full article at the Yale Daily News Web site.