Well, after close to a year of waiting, Apple finally delivered what I was waiting for: iTunes 4. What's so cool about it? Well, it supports rendezvous. What does this mean? Well, it means I can easily listen to the mp3s on my server from my laptop (as long as I'm on my home network). Yes, I could have (and do) share out the directory that my mp3s are in. But the thing that rocks about rendezvous is that it automaticly finds shared out playlists and makes them available. We also just figured out that you can share out your playlists so that you can listen to them from anywhere you have OS X and iTunes 4. I connected to a friend's computer and listened to music from it.

Apple also opened up its online music store. From within iTunes you can browse for songs and listen to them. If you like a song, just click on a button and buy it for 99 cents. I of course had to try it out and bought Rock the Casbah. Very cool. It also lets you burn CDs with the music you buy, which is even more cool.

Now, this is getting to where I want home networking to be. You should be able to just fire up a machine on your network and be able to access the music from wherever it is on your network. Of course now this brings up another thing I just thought of. With things like rendezvous it doesn't matter where the content on your network lives. So you could either have it on some kind of NAS box or on whatever machines you have. Hmmmm.

Oh well, off to rip more music (uh oh, AAC or mp3?)