Download Music From Any Shared iTunes Library with OurTunes

January 11th, 2008, 21:11 Posted By: wraggster

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.

Problems?
I only ran into one problem testing ourTunes, and it only appeared on my Mac (Windows tests went without a hitch). When you choose the download folder, for some reason ourTunes was incorrectly saving the folder with a weird sort of duplication. That is, if I chose ~/Documents as my download folder, ourTunes tried saving to ~/Documents/Documents. The way I got around this was to create a second Documents folder inside the original Documents folder, then choose ~\Documents as my download directory. I'd assume this bug will be addressed eventually, but in the meantime that workaround should do the trick.
If you're sick of the restrictions Apple places on iTunes music sharing on your local network, ourTunes will do the trick. ourTunes is freeware, Windows and Mac only, requires Java.

http://saveourtunes.com/

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