I've decided to start sharing some great free software I've found, so I'll post a new one every Wednesday. This week's is ourTunes.

iTunes is an extremely popular music player and store. If you haven't heard of it, it has the largest market share of legal music downloads (they cost $.99 each), it is the companion software for the most popular mp3 player (the iPod) and is a great music player with great features like the library, search and smart playlists. If you are on a local area network, you can share your music with others on that network - the key word is "share." The only downside to iTunes is that you can only listen to other people's music; you can't download it and add it to your collection.

That is where ourTunes comes in. ourTunes shows all the music of everyone on the network and allows you to listen to or download the music. This is perfect for anyone at college because a large amount of people have iTunes running. You can either browse through all the songs, limit it to certain computers (called "hosts") or do a search for a specific song. If you are on a large network, i suggest the search.

If you don't use iTunes, you should at least check it out. I personally think its the best music player available; much more powerful than winamp, which I used back before I had iTunes. If you have iTunes and are on a network, this is a great piece of software that you should definately get. Before you download your next song, just do a quick search and see if it's already available on your network.

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