Family's best iTunes Friend - Mojo

Like more and more people I have a household of internet connected devices and a family sharing those devices. I've long used iTunes to acquire and manage music and until a few years ago having all iTunes activity concentrated on one computer was convenient enough. These days I need the library to be available on each computer. 

iTunes has a music sharing feature which works quite well if all you want to do is listen to the library from a "secondary" computer. However Apple has intentionally crippled library sharing by preventing you from burning a CD using shared songs (in fact you can't even create a playlist of your own using a shared song). My level of frustration from the inconvenience of having to buy music and burn CDs for the rest of my family finally reached the threshold to make me do something about it.

The key use cases I wanted to address were:

1. Ability to log into any computer in the house and burn a CD with music in the library
2. Ability to shop for and buy music from any computer in the house and have it accessible to all the other computers

It took quite a bit of searching to find a solution but I finally found a tool called Mojo by Deusty. Mojo has a free version which provides some nice sharing features. However it is the Pro version which caught my eye because it solves both use cases at a cost of only $11 (3 licenses). 

On each computer I have created a iTunes smart playlist that includes all music added in the last two months. I installed Mojo on each computer and used the Pro version's "subscribe" feature to subscribe to the "recently added" playlist. This means Mojo will monitor changes in the playlist on each computer and automatically download new music. The end result is a "hands off" method of making our music available to everyone in the house. It is working flawlessly and I couldn't be happier (well, if this was a feature of iTunes I'd be happier...).

One caveat - at this point virtually none of our music has DRM. When Apple announced almost all music would move to the Plus format, and have no DRM, I chose to update songs I had previously purchased. I had done some tests and found the audio quality improvement in the "iTunes Plus" versions was significant. If your songs are DRM'd Mojo will not download them.

Now know one has to be frustrated that Dad doesn't have time to get all the music files onto a single machine to burn their CD for them and Dad doesn't have to listen to whining :-)

From a security standpoint no one outside of our network can get to our libraries since our router blocks connections to the Mojo port.