When I reviewed Hamachi for Mac a few weeks ago and called it a great, free alternative to Apple’s Back to My Mac, I noted how Hamachi – among other things – managed to successfully enable remote iTunes Home Sharing between two Macs. The iTunes Home Sharing functionality, introduced on iOS 4.3 for iOS devices and Macs on the same local network (and a long-time favorite of iTunes desktop users), allows you to share your entire iTunes library locally, wirelessly, between computers and iPhones or iPads. But wouldn’t it be great to have the same feature available on Macs connected remotely to each other? Hamachi does that out of the box, but Back to My Mac doesn’t. RemoteTunes, a $5 utility, fixes this.
Once installed, RemoteTunes will find Macs that are sharing the same Back to My Mac credentials on your network. If Back to My Mac is correctly configured, you should see a machine pop up under the Shared tab in your OS X Finder. RemoteTunes will find the remote shared library (makes sure to activate iTunes Home Sharing on the remote machine), and let you stream music between Macs using MobileMe as the communication tool. It all works in the background, and it’s basically a graphical user interface for complex SSH and DNS commands most users don’t want to mess with. I’ve tried this on a friend’s iMac (I’m no longer a MobileMe user), and I was pleased to see connections happening through RemoteTunes were stable, and reliable.
If you’re a MobileMe subscriber, at $5 RemoteTunes is a no-brainer. It won’t work with iOS devices, but it will stream music between Macs just fine.
