XtraSimplicity

I recently found a tutorial that explains how to stream music from your iTunes library (or any music directory, for that matter) to your iPod/iPhone, for computers running Mac OSX, and so figured I may as well make a tutorial for users who use Windows, to do the same.

The original tutorial can be found here (for Mac OSX).

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First you’ll need a PHP-enabled HTTP (web) server which you can use to host the ‘streaming’ package.
You can either download and install Apache HTTP Server and PHP5 manually, or you can install WAMP, an automated software application which aims to simplify the installation process.
Please Note: If your server is to be externally-accessible, I strongly suggest you install and configure Apache HTTP Server and PHP5 manually, as it allows you to have more control over security settings.

1) Download WAMP from here (~16Mb).
2) Open the WAMP installer, and follow the prompts.


Select a directory where WAMP should be installed to. I personally left it as the default, as it doesn’t really make much of a difference.


When asked to select your browser, if you use Internet Explorer, just click Okay. Otherwise browse to the location of your browser’s executable. For Firefox, this is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe.

If a dialog appears, warning about Windows Firewall blocking Apache, click “Allow access”.

Nice work, WAMP is now installed.
Now if you browse to http://localhost/ you should see the following web page:

3) Now you’ll need to set your music directory to be accessible by your web server.
There are a few ways to do this:
1) You can copy your music to WAMP’s ‘htdocs’ directory
2) You can change WAMP’s ‘htdocs’ directory to the location of your Music directory
3) You can create a symbolic link, allowing you to leave the rest of your files where they are.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I will be choosing the symbolic link option, as I prefer its functionality (and is more linux-like).

Creating a Symbolic Link on Windows Vista/ Windows 7:
Using a Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer,
i) click Start
ii) type ‘cmd’ in the search box
iii) press ctrl + shift + enter together.
iv) Click ‘yes’ on the UAC permissions dialog box.
v) type mklink /D <folder 1> <folder 2>
i.e. mklink /D C:\Test C:\Users\Username\Desktop\Test links C:\Test and C:\Users\Username\Desktop\Test together, so if you have files in C:\Users\Username\Desktop\Test, you can view those files by opening either C:\Users\Username\Desktop\Test or C:\Test.

Creating a Symbolic Link on Windows XP:
The same theory above (for Windows 7 and Vista) applies to Windows XP, too, but, instead of using mklink, you will need to use an application called Winbolic. You can download it here.

For the sake of this tutorial, I used mklink /D C:\wamp\www\itunes C:\wamp\www\itunes\iTunes Media\Music.

4) Download the PHP files for the streaming package from here (owner’s site) or here (local Mirror).
5) Unzip this file, and copy the iPhone folder to your WAMP ‘www’ directory (by default, this is C:\wamp\www), overwriting any files if asked.
6) Copy the iTunes folder to your music directory. In my case, this was C:\users\Andrew\Music, but yours will probably be different. It will be the same directory that you created a symbolic link to.
7) That’s it! If you’ve followed this tutorial correctly, you should be greeted with a page like this, when you access your ‘website’ via your iPod/iPhone.

You can access your website using: http://<IP_of_your_computer_with_WAMP_installed>/iphone.
You can access it locally (on the computer that has WAMP installed) using: http://localhost/iphone/