Listen to Music on Your Home Computer from Anywhere
Do you want to listen to the music stored on your home computer while you're at work or on your laptop sipping coffee at a cafe? or maybe share your music collection with your buddies?
There's a secure and simple way to do this using OpenTape on top of Remobo that lets you have live, streaming access to your music from a web browser on any other computer.
access your music from anywhere using a web browser
This tutorial will show you how to do it in a few easy steps... and everything you need is just a free download away :-) It also works on both Macs and PCs.
Share Your Music Collection Privately using OpenTape
After muxtape (a super simple web-based music sharing site) shut down, they graciously released an open source version of their software called OpenTape so that individuals could create their own muxtape clones for sharing music.
Its fairly easy to install OpenTape on a public web server, upload a few songs and share it with the world, but this tutorial will tell you how to use OpenTape on your OWN computer to share your entire music collection securely and privately with only the people you want to have access to it.
Note: This tutorial is based on OS X Leopard on my Macbook Pro, but everything here can also run on a Windows machine with minimal changes.
Setting Up the Web Server (Apache and PHP5)
Mac OS X Leopard already comes with Apache and PHP5, so you won't have to download anything to get started. On a Windows machine, you should download the latest version of PHP5 and Apache. Here is a good tutorial on getting it setup in Windows. After that, just skip to the next section... or continue reading if you are on a Mac...
Enable PHP
PHP is installed in Mac OS X by default, but it is not enabled. To enable it, you should edit the apache configuration file, which is located at /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. Find the line that loads PHP 5, which looks like this:
#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Now remove the comment symbol, #, so the line looks like this:
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Save the file and continue...
Starting Apache
Go to the "sharing" panel in your "system preferences" and enable “Web Sharing.” This should start up the apache web server on your machine.
If you have the Personal Firewall installed on your MAC or Windows machine that runs Web Server, you wanna make sure it allows incoming connections for the Web Server. Here's how to check it for MAC: Go to the "Security" panel in your "System Preferences" and click on "Firewall" tab; you can either choose the radio button of "Allow all incoming connection", or "Set access for specific services and applications" and make sure "Web Sharing", as well as RemoboOSX, is listed that "Allow incoming connections" (see below):
To test if its working, you can click on the URL under “Your computer’s website.” Or, open up your web browser, and go to the url http://localhost/. From there you will see a welcome screen from Apache. If so, then you are good to go.
Download and Install OpenTape
First, make sure you grab the latest version of OpenTape. Save the file somewhere and unzip it.
Installing
After you have unzipped the OpenTape package, you should copy the entire contents of that folder to your web server's root directory. If you followed the above instructions, the default web server root on Mac OS X is /Library/WebServer/Documents. I first cleared all the default apache files in there, before copying over the OpenTape files. On Windows, simply find the default root dir for your web server, and copy the files there.
opentape directory structure
Note that you can also put OpenTape in a subdir if you prefer. But since I am only using the web server for sharing music, I chose to put everything at the root web server dir for easier access.
Setting Up OpenTape
OpenTape is very easy to use and there are just a couple steps to setting it up. First, make sure that the "songs/" and "settings/" folders are writable. To do that, I just entered the following commands inside the web server's root folder:
sudo chmod 777 songs
sudo chmod 777 settings
opentape fodler permissions error message
Be careful, this will give everyone on your computer access to these folders... but in most cases its fine, especially if you are the only one using your computer anyway.
Now that the folders are writable by OpenTape, open your web browser and go back to http://localhost/.
You should see the OpenTape setup page which will ask you to set a password. This password is required for you to manage and upload mp3s to your server though the web.
After that's done, you will see the following page, which means you are all set to go. You can add songs and manage your playlist from this page, but since we are interested in sharing a large selection of music, we will do it all at once on the backend.
Adding Music by Copying
The first method to add music to the OpenTape playlist is by copying files into the "songs/" folder under your web server. Unfortunately, you cannot have sub-folders, so you will have to copy any song you want to share directly into that folder.
The benefit of this is that you have a separate copy of the music for sharing, and you won't have to rearrange your personal music folders.
Adding Music by Linking
The alternative method, especially useful if you already have a whole folder of music somewhere, is to use a link to share your music directly. First, remove the "songs/" folder and then create a symbolic link to your own music folder (let's call it MyMusic) by entering the following in a Terminal:
rm -rf songs/
ln -s /path/to/MyMusic songs
This will create a link from the "songs/" folder to your actual music folder, so be careful not to delete anything later on by mistake!
Sharing Your Music
At this point, you can visit http://localhost/ again and you should see all the music that you put into the "songs/" folder. Try clicking around... the amazing OpenTape software lets you listen to anything in that list instantly! Very cool...
However, without one more step, only you and people on your LAN probably have access to this... so lets do one more thing to give yourself access or share this music with your buddies over the Internet easily and securely.
The Old Way
The old way to share this newly setup OpenTape music library is to either get a static IP address or use a domain name to map to your computer. This will also require some extra configuration on your router or DSL/Cable modem to open up your computer to the world.
The benefit is that anyone can now access your web server and listen to your music, but this can also be a liability since you are also opening yourself up to hackers and anyone will have full access to the music you are sharing. It can also add some cost to the setup, since static ips and domain names are not generally free.
The Easy and Secure Way to Share
This tutorial is all about sharing your music privately, securely and easily, so lets see how we can do that using Remobo...
Just run Remobo on both computers, open up a web browser on the remote side and point it to:
<your_remobo_username>.remobo.com
Then, just click on a song to start listening!
OpenTape will start streaming the song immediately and the quality is excellent.
This is a super safe way to share your music, since everything is securely encrypted and only your buddies (and yourself) have access.
Wrapping Up
For those of you that are not familiar with Remobo, here are a few more details...
Login to Remobo and Add Your Buddies
If you don’t already have Remobo installed, you can grab it here.
After that just create a new account instantly or login with your existing one. Then, have your buddies do the same and add them to your buddy list.
At its core, this app will create an instant VPN between you and your buddies so everything you send and receive from each other over Remobo is encrypted and secure. This is what keeps everything “private”.
Start Sharing!
Now that you and your buddies have Remobo installed, it will be as if you are on the same LAN. All they have to do is open their web browser to:
<your_remobo_username>.remobo.com
or alternatively, if you are logged in at more than one computer,
<computer_name>.<username>.remobo.com
and they will be able to view and listen to all the music you shared! This URL will work for anyone in your Remobo buddy list (including yourself) and no one else can see or access your music. You also stay completely safe from hackers, since you have not opened up any ports to the public.
In fact, ISPs can’t even see what you are doing since they just see a bunch of encrypted data packets… kinda like what it would look like if you were working from home via your corporate VPN ;-)
