Musicast 1.0.2

reviewed by Daphne Kalfon

If you choose to download without purchasing, apparently a “nag screen” will keep coming up to remind you that you have yet to purchase the software, and the number of playlists you can share will be limited - to what number, I don’t know. The people behind Musicast are a small team of developers/dedicated Mac users, so if you are enjoying your Musicast experience, please consider paying the $18 USD.

Once downloaded, it states that future updates are provided to registered users at no additional cost.

Musicast’s main purpose is to allow people to share their music by broadcasting their iTunes playlists to the internet as a webpage or podcast. Your playlists can be accessed from any web browser and subscribed to in iTunes, through RSS, a mobile device or podcast software. You can share an unlimited number of playlists.

From the outset Musicast states that it is not intended for the sharing of playlists of copyrighted material, but only for music that you have created yourself or that is available without purchase, for example possibly from indie band websites or a community of GarageBand users or something similar, where no purchase is necessary to download the music made available there.

I had plenty of those kinds of playlists already in my iTunes library so after I installed Musicast, I checked those playlists I would like to share. Then under the File menu, I chose Visit my Musicast and a separate window came up containing the playlists I had checked off.

At the bottom of that window it says Copy & paste this URL to your buddies. Above it is the URL they are referring to. That URL as I found after trying it, is not one that can be used for IP addressing or web addressing. It’s an Ethernet MAC address of a computer inside a local network behind a router. What it should show is the IP address to access the router from outside the local network and then direct the IP traffic to the appropriate computer behind the router inside the local network.

To accomplish this, one would have to know how to open up ports and forward them to the correct address through a router to make this possible. This is sometimes called a virtual server on a router. In this case a new virtual server with TCP /IP port 5554 opened for incoming and outgoing traffic to be forwarded to an internal IP address of the computer that is running the maccast software. What is given on the website’s support section is a brief albeit accurate explanation, but it doesn’t tell you how to go about correcting the problem.

Fortunately, with some help from my techie hubby, I was able to get things up and running to make sure that others could view my playlists and listen in.

Now let’s look at the features it comes with. Under the “Musicast” menu, if you choose Preferences, you can set several different items the way you would like them. The first is “Musicast”. This allows you to give your musicast a title and description, as well as choosing a particular graphic to go along with it. These features allow to to customize your musicast.

The second item you can set is called “Access”. You can choose whether or not the people who want to have access to your musicast must provide personal identification. If the box is checked, that means that users will have to identify themselves before being able to listen to any of your music. Users can be integrated into your Address Book contacts. If the box is unchecked, users don’t have to be in your address book to listen in.

The third item is called “Serving”. In this window, the default server port number is already given for Musicast, and you can also set the number of downloads that can be made from your playlist.

The fourth and last item is called “Display”, which simply allows you to choose how you would like Musicast to be displayed: in the Dock and Menu Bar or just one or the other.

Musicast will keep track of who is subscribing to your musicast and which of your songs, artists and playlists are the most popular among those who are listening in.

All in all, Musicast is a fun and useful add-on for your iTunes music library.