The world adores matt hayward

One thing truly sucks about the iPhone. You CAN’T share your music library on the iPod with your friends. You can only syncronise your songs and videos with iTunes. But don’t despair, Airshare to the rescue!

Airsharing is a relatively cheap application for your iPhone. Basically, it sets up a web server on your iphone which you can access by IP address. Then you can copy and paste files from your iPhone to any other computer via wireless networks (WLAN). You can either load the IP address up in your browser, or setup a ’shared drive’ on your Windows machine or Mac.

Files shared using Airshare on iphone

Sadly, you can setup new directories to share out on your iPhone but you can’t share your music. But what I’ve learnt is that if you copy music to the public directory Airshare creates, you can play it. It doesn’t play within the iPod, it plays using Quicktime. Sadly it only plays one song at at a time too, but it works! So then if you want to transport tunes, you can copy it using Airshare to your iPhone. Get to where you’re going, open a web browser and copy over.

Next question: how fast is the file transfer? Pretty good actually. At least as fast as iTunes can copy music to your iPod. Perhaps like 400K per second or something. It’s not freaky fast, but it’s not crazy slow. It’s pretty bloody good! Maybe a few seconds for a 5 meg file.

Airshare is no substitute for a device that would let you do what you want with your music. Instead Apple have setup a musical nanny that wont let you be naughty. But for an application that costs about $7 (it was free initially. Sadly no more), it’s incredibly bloody useful. You may never have to carry around a stupid little USB stick again!