Through maturation, iTunes has become the hub for all things digital and entertainment related, both on Macs and PCs. Now, as well as buying music, you can rent and buy movies through it and manage your iPhone or iPod touch and their many applications. One area in which iTunes has perhaps not been quite as flexible as it could be is in the sharing of content. One workaround is to use Library Sharing, which lets you share and browse iTunes libraries on a local network, though only for streaming. Now, iTunes 9 introduces Home Sharing, which lets you authorise up to five Macs or PCs running iTunes on your local network. It also enables you to stream music and video, and drag and drop content between them. If you consider that an iPod or iPhone needs to be synced with a single Mac, you'll see the benefit of Home Sharing. If you rip a CD on one Mac, someone else in the house can play it on their Mac and also now drag the files to their Mac and sync the tracks to their iPod or iPhone. Previously, this involved locating files in the Finder and copying them manually. Now, it's all done from within iTunes.
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