Song files are not small, and album folders filled with songs are quite large.
Copying a music library from a Mac to a PC, or vice versa, is not a simple task because of the enormity of the file sizes.
Don’t even think about e-mail. If the file is over four, it won’t go through the door.(Four megabytes, that is; and the door is the limitation of your Internet Service Provider’s e-mail server.) And if you use a .Mac e-mail account, that limitation is more like 3MB.
Attaching a file to an e-mail message is the most popular method of transfer-ring a file to someone, but there is a limit as to what you can attach. Most e-mail servers in the world won’t accept an attachment larger than 5MB;
some won’t accept larger than 3MB.
Well, heck, just about every jazz tune and Grateful Dead jam we listen to in iTunes is larger than 3MB. A song compressed in the AAC or MP3 format is typically between 2 and 10MB, so you might get by with one pop song attached to an e-mail, but that’s it.
How do you transfer larger amounts of music? One way would be with an external FireWire or a USB hard drive formatted for a PC — an iPod installed for Windows would do nicely, and you can learn all about using an iPod as a hard drive in Chapter 25. The Mac should recognize it when you plug it in, even though the drive is formatted for Windows, and you can copy files directly to the hard drive, and then take the hard drive over to your PC. You need FireWire or USB to connect an external drive. (USB is much slower.)
On a LAN you can share forever — if your computers communicate over a local-area network, they can share files . . . even large ones. To copy large song files or entire album folders between two Macs in a LAN, all you need to do is allow personal file sharing on your Mac. This sounds like a liberal thing to do, inviting all sorts of mischief and voyeurism, but you can control what others can do. (The converse is true: If someone wants to make a file or folder available to youover a LAN, all he has to do is enable personal file sharing.) Mac OS X makes it very easy to share files and folders with Windows comput-ers. You can enable Windows file sharing on the Mac, or access the Windows computer from a Mac. To access a Windows PC from a Mac, you need a valid user ID and password for an account on the Windows computer. You can go right to that account’s Home directory on the Windows computer, and use your Mac to copy folders and files to and from the Windows computer. For more information about file sharing on a Mac and specifically between Mac and Windows computers on a network, see Mac OS X Panther All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies,by Mark L. Chambers (Wiley).
Copying very large song files over the Internet is more complex, involving use of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Although it’s easy to download an MP3 song file from a Web page or an FTP site with any browser (all you need is the Web or FTP address — and a user ID and password if the site is protected), you can’t sendthe file to a protected site with most browsers unless the site is set up for this function. One easy way to share your files from a Mac is to use the .Mac service to create a Web page that accommodates anyone with the right password, even Windows-using folks, to visit and download files you put there.
For information about setting up a .Mac account, see iLife All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummiesby yours truly (Wiley).
To make it easy for others to copy files to and from a Mac at their convenience, enable FTP access for the Mac. To do this, open System Preferences, click the Sharing icon, and click the Services tab. Select the FTP Access option. A mes-sage appears at the bottom of the Sharing window providing the address of your FTP server on your Mac — something like ftp://192.168.1.246/. Give this address to those with an account on your computer, and they can access files and folders by using a Web browser, an FTP client such as Fetch, or Mac OS X.
How about transferring song files to other FTP sites, such as a password-protected site that requires use of an FTP client? Here are several options:
Use an FTP client,such as Fetch. You can find Fetch at http://
fetchsoftworks.comfor $25 as of this writing. You can use it for several weeks before paying for it.
Use the FTP function inside another application,such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Use the free Terminal applicationsupplied with Mac OS X, found in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder, which offers FTP.
For instructions, see Mac OS X Panther All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies,by Mark L. Chambers (Wiley).
Fetch provides an easy drag-and-drop interface for transferring any type of file with FTP servers. After you establish a connection with the FTP server by typing the appropriate information (the FTP server name, your ID, your password, and the directory that you have access to), you can drag files to and from the FTP server window via the Finder, or you can browse folders to select files and then use the Get and Put Files buttons.
You can send an entire folder of files, such as an album of songs or an artist folder with multiple albums, by stuffing the folder (or even a set of folders) into a compressed file. StuffIt Deluxe from Aladdin Systems (www.stuffit.com) can compress the folder into one Zip or StuffIt file. (Zip is a standard compres-sion format for Windows-based PCs.) You can then transfer the Zip file to the FTP server in one step. While the Zip or StuffIt file formats compress other types of files, if your music files are already compressed as MP3 or AAC the files won’t get any smaller. However, the format offers a compact way of send-ing an entire folder of files.