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What has become a trend since the beginning of digital music on the Internet is to share playlists of your favourite songs. By doing it, you are literally sharing a "what I'm listening to" list, almost like an online music diary, and don't have to worry about breaking any laws or getting in trouble. Even with the newest trend of online blogging, or keeping a digital journal, many bloggers will keep a list of their favourite music tracks, a profile of their musical interests - all made easier since many music player software will output playlists in a text format that's easy to put online. Radio stations, announcers, and music artists are also beginning to take advantage of another new trend, podcasting, to automatically deliver scheduled music content, top ten lists, favourite songs, and updates, which can be received using podcast software such as Apple’s iTunes or iPodder, and portable music devices such as the iPod.
To actually share songs themselves online, you have to take a few more steps. For music you record yourself, you can copy it up to any web server and link to it from your web site, however, make sure it's in a standardized format - MP3 is the best for broad compatibility.
Again within your home, you can store all your songs on one computer, and then share that folder or hard drive to make it accessible throughout your own network using standard network file and drive sharing from the computer. Most music players will allow you to play files locally that are actually on a remote hard drive, and some applications, like Shoutcast, will stream those songs directly out to any local networked computer easily within your LAN - of course, any time you add on another application, there is more configuration and potential headaches.
The easiest way to share music is by bringing it with you, although some DRM-protected music files may have restrictions on how many times they can be copied. Burn it audio tracks to a CD and listen to them with a portable CD player, your car stereo, or hook the headphone output of your player to a friend's stereo and listen to your tunes through their stereo. In fact, with the popularity in small portable music players and iPods, it's becoming more common for employees to leave the speaker jack for their computer's speakers within easy reach - they come in for work and hook their player up to the speakers for better sound quality and then detach when they leave for the day - by far, the easiest way to play the music you like at work.
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