Long post...

From my perspective, the problem of hosting my music files for use around the home was solved a long time ago: http://marknelson.us/articles/mp3/Mp3.html. Like most of the people who read these forums, I have a big shared drive with nicely tagged MP3 files. It's easy to use them with other PCs as well as dedicated media players of all types.

A slight aside - about a year ago, it became possible to offload my stored photos to a Flickr - quite nice because now somebody responsible is in charge of backing them up and making sure I don't lose the family jewels.

Music was slightly different. In most cases, I have my music on CDs, and in the case of total catastrophe, could rip them again - that's gotten downright trivial. So I wasn't as worried about backup of my those files.

But, just a couple of weeks ago, I read about the new locker service that mp3tunes was providing. I realized I could scam them into letting me store all my files for free by making temp copies on my personal web server, loading them, then removing them.

Well, after I was about 2/3 of the way through my collection, (20 something G which makes me a Rockstar in mp3tunes lingo) my web hosting service, dreamhost.com, announces that out of the goodness of their heart, they're quadrupling my storage space, which means even my unexciting personal web account now has enough space and bandwidth to hold all my music for no extra money.

Now this is interesting, because it means I can now move my familiy music connection to a globally accessible server. Instead of listening to music anywhere around the house, we can now listen to it anywhere we have a reasonably high speed Internet connection - with work and school being the most exciting possibilties.

All this is prelude to my question (finally).

I can't seem to find a satisfactory way to make my music accessible in a way that makes everyone happy. I know that I can use server side software like Zinf or whatever, but guess what, everyone would prefer to use iTunes, Winamp, WMP, or the like.

The default way to make all my files usable is to simply let the family browse them via http, but it doesn't look like iTunes or anyone else is too happy with that. So the first part of my question is: is there any software that will create playlist files with HTTP pointersthat can be dragged into iTunes and/or WMP and create an HTTP based solution that works really well?

If the answer to that is NO, my second choice is WebDAV. I can post the MP3 files in a folder that can then be access via WebDAV. I've done some tests on that so far, and it's not totally optimal. On my both Mac and Windows, dragging the files into iTunes results in a pretty long and tedious scan. Actually playing the files is not too bad on my Mac, although there is an annoying delay before starting each song. On Windows, apparently iTunes and WMP are not smart enough to realize that WebDAV is essentially a streaming protocol, and thus I get lots of dropouts.

Okay, super long setup, but tell me, is this problem solved and I just don't know about it? Does anyone have a description of a setup that works well and makes people happy at work, home, and on multiple different machines? Or are we just not quite there yet?

And don't suggest SMB - dreamhost doesn't offer it, and I suspect I would have the same dropout problems that I already have with WebDAV.

Jinzora!

Okay, I kind of put Jinzora in the categoryof Netjuke and Zinf - it's going to shoehorn me into using their interface, and won't support a nice native iTunes interface. Am I wrong?

You can navigate in jinzora to find your tunes and use it to generate playlists that iTunes will read and play. But no, you'll not be able to have the list of all mp3s on your iTunes directly.