14 DAY TRIAL // The appearance of MP3s marked the beginning of a revolution in terms of how people enjoyed music. Of course, in the beginning, few used MP3s as they required substantial processing power to encode and decode, but the potential to store ten CDs worth of music into one single CD was exciting to everyone. Today, storage has become very accessible and processing power is often more than the user will ever need, however other factors are beginning to come into the picture. Ease and accessibility are becoming the next big thing, and while a monster music collection on your computer is nice when you are sitting at your computer, it is not exactly portable. Of course, there are portable players and wireless networks and iTunes talks to other computers to let you access the music over the local network, but that does not remove the issue of controlling the music itself from a remote location.
While there have been several applications that have attempted this task, one of them is better than all the rest, namely netTunes.
What it does
netTunes is a program that allows you to remotely control music playback. Broken down, it lets you play music on one machine, and control the playback from another machine on the same network. This gets rid of the annoying issue of having to be physically present at the machine that is playing in order to control the playback and allows for great flexibility in setting up a complex network simply because the machine that is doing the playback does not even require a display, making it ideal for use with media center minis.
Best possible interface
iTunes is a great program, both in terms of what it does and how it does it, and many people who have written all sorts of iTunes controllers have come up against the issue of making an interface that is as easy to use as that of the original application. netTunes has no such problem as it does not even attempt to reinvent the wheel, it uses the best possible interface for controlling iTunes, that of iTunes itself.
When you connect to a server to control it, netTunes opens up a local iTunes window that is identical to the one on the remote machine, and mimics everything you do on your machine on the target machine. This even goes beyond choosing a song and adjusting the volume. You can edit track information, make playlists and everything else you could do if you were standing at that machine itself.
The common interface means that there is no learning curve and no aggravation over particular design choices. The experience is identical, making it hard for anyone to realize they are not using iTunes itself if they do not look at the menu bar.
Flexibility
netTunes will let you control music playback on one machine from another remote one. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. With music sharing enabled in iTunes you can play music from any one of your machines, at a central music playing computer, and you can also control the playback from any one of those computers. Add to this the fact that you can have portables that connect wirelessly to the network and you can have a very complex setup, and be able to control music playback from just about anywhere.
But it is not just basic playback that netTunes offers, it takes things all the way. The information that iTunes normally makes available to the rest of the system when it is playing on your machine, such as what track you are listening to and the progress of the song is also broadcast to the machines that are connected to the server. This means that you can use netTunes to control the music played back on the mini in your living room and still have third party programs such as Synergy, and iChat properly work on your machine.
The Good
Very easy to set up and use, uses the iTunes interface for an identical user experience and has all the compatibility you could ever wish for.
The Bad
It likes resources a lot due to the way it uses the iTunes interface, so it can get slow on some older machines that could be ideally used as servers.
The Truth
Simply the best remote iTunes control solution available. Has everything, and it's a joy to use.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
