Listen To All Your Music Remotely

For a phone, the iPhone has a considerably enormous amount of storage space. Although 8GB is a lot for a phone, it's not a lot when you think of the iPhone as an iPod. An 80GB iPod is the only thing that holds all of my media, but I don't always want to bring it with me. So what happens if I want to hear a podcast or listen to music that I haven't synced to the phone? For this, I use one of my favorite iPhone apps, iPhone Remote (aka Telekinesis).

iPhone remote, for those that don't know, is an application which runs on your Mac as a remote control server. When you access it via Safari on your iPhone, the app provides access to things like your Mac's camera, files, spotlight, scripts, and even the screen itself. In a recent update to Telekinesis, the ability to stream media was added. This, my friends, is the feature I like most.

After starting up and configuring iPhone Remote, the remote is accessed via iPhone's Safari. The URL will end up being your Mac's IP address, followed by the port number (something like https://192.168.1.5:5010). If you want to stream media, you'll want to check the box in iPhone Remote's preferences which says "Share media insecurely". This allows media to be streamed from your Mac to the iPhone. Now all you need to do is tap "Files" on your iPhone and start browsing. If your media isn't in your home folder, you have the ability to see all drives on your Mac by tapping its name at the top of the page. Once you find what you're looking for, tap it and it plays. To do use iPhone Remote outside of your local network, you'll need to forward ports 5010 and 5012 to your Mac.

The only problem you'll face is in what your iPhone can actually play. Essentially, only media that can play on your iPhone via iTunes will work using this method. This means that DivX and large h.264 videos won't play, nor will protected audio and video files. For the most part it works nicely, especially for audio.

Telekinesis is a wonderful application and does much more than just stream media. If you're good at coding, you might want to look into developing a "Tapp". Tapps are little plugins for Telekinesis which add functionality.

Check it out free of charge, at its Google Code page.

Update: Check out the Simplify Media application. It's free and available in the App Store.

For more info please visit: www.iphonealley.com