How to Set Up Home Sharing on IPAD

Did you know that you don't have to load all of your music or movies onto your iPad to enjoy them at home? One neat feature of iTunes is the ability to stream music and movies between devices using Home Sharing. This allows you to get access to your digital movie collection without taking up a lot of space on your iPad by streaming the movie to your device. 

You'll be surprised at just how easy it is to set up iPad Home Sharing, and once you have it enabled, you can easily stream your entire music or movie collection to your iPad. You can also use Home Sharing to import music from your desktop PC to your laptop. 

And when you combine Home Sharing with Apple's Digital AV Adapter, you can stream a movie from your PC to your HDTV. This can give you some of the same benefits of Apple TV without forcing you to purchase another device. 

The first step to sharing music between iTunes and the iPad is turning on iTunes Home Sharing. This is actually quite simple, and once you have gone through the steps to turning on Home Sharing, you'll wonder why you didn't always have it turned on.

1. Launch iTunes on your PC or Mac.
2. Under the Advanced menu item, choose Turn On Home Sharing
3. You'll be presented with a screen similar to the one pictured above. Simply type in your Apple ID and your password and you'll be ready to start sharing music and movies with your iPad, iPhone or any other iOS device.

Once you've turned on Home Sharing, any other computers with iTunes Home Sharing turned on will show up in the left-side menu in iTunes. They will appear right under your connected devices.

Remember: Only computers and devices connected to your home network will be eligible. If you have a computer not connected to the network, you will be unable to use it for Home Sharing.

After you setup Home Sharing on iTunes, it is quite easy to get it working with the iPad. And once you have iPad Home Sharing working, you can share music, movies, podcasts and audiobooks. This means you can get access to your entire music and movie collection without taking up valuable space on your iPad.

1. Go into your iPad's settings by touching the settings icon. It is the icon that looks like gears turning.
2. On the left-hand side of the screen is the list of options. Scroll down until you see iPod. It's the setting below Safari.
3. Once you have the iPod settings selected, you'll see a screen like the one above. Simply type in your Apple ID and password just as you did to set up iTunes home sharing.

And that's it. You can now share your music and movies from your PC or laptop to your iPad. Who needs a 64 GB model when you can just use iTunes Home Sharing?

Remember: You'll need to have your iPad and your computer connected to your Wi-Fi network to use iTunes Home Sharing.

Now that you can share your music and movies between iTunes and your iPad, you might want to know how to find it on your iPad. Once you have everything setup and working, you can listen to the music collection on your PC the same way you listen to music installed on your iPad.

1. Launch the iPod application. This app is usually kept in the tray at the bottom of the iPad.
2. The left-hand side of the iPod app displays a list of categories like Music, Podcasts and Audiobooks. The first selection is "Library". Touch this and your Home Sharing list will appear similar to the image above.
3. To listen to a shared library, simply select it from the list. Not only will this give you access to all of the songs in your library, you'll also have access to your playlists.

It is also easy to watch movies and videos through home sharing.

1. Launch the Videos application on your iPad.
2. Choose the Shared tab at the top of the screen.
3. Select a shared library. If you are sharing your iTunes collection from more than one computer, you may have several shared libraries from which to choose.
4. Once a library is chosen, the available videos and movies will be listed. Simply choose the one you want to watch.

Did you know that you can listen to other people’s iTunes libraries from your own computer and let those people listen to yours?