Vista - Share music between computers?

I have 2 Vista 64 machines on the same router. One of the machines holds my music library. Are there step by step instructions on what I have to do to allow music and playlists from my media server to be played by the other computer?

I am a network neanderthal, you can't be too simple in your answers. To put this in perspective, I can't even figure out how to map the two computers together as network drives, and I think I might even have the same computer name for the two gonks which makes everything more confusing .

TIA

Dear, if your computers are in same physical segment and you dont use router...it means you should config them as same logical subnet.
to doing this, put them in same subnet mask.
you can configure these by clicking properties of TCP/IP stack protocol.
help: right click on your lan network connection and choose properties...and then choose TCP/IP properties.

give them these ip addresses:

192.168.0.1
192.168.0.2

with these IP addresses, remote machines at internet,can not connect to your home lan...so it will be safe.


then they can communicate together via a workgroup scheme.
you can create a workgroup by going on properties of my computer.
on computer name Tab,click on change...do this as the same for all of your computers.

then restart.

at this time you need to share your folders ( mp3 )...dont forget: we can not share files on Microsoft Windows..it is only possible to sharing folders.

for sharing folders,please click on properties of your folders...then choose sharing tab.

you can browse your workgroup machines by my network places at XP and Network at Vista.

another way is using UNC address...

in run type:
\\destination computer name or its ip address\sharefolder

if you want to using computer name on UNC address, you should enable this option on TCP/IP properties:

go to wins tab and make enable netbios over tcp/ip.
NBT or netBT is short of netbios over tcp/ip.
Netbios was a stack protocol which designed by IBM and was worked on session layer of OSI model.
Microsoft adopted it for using on transport layer and renamed it as NETBEUI.
NETBUEI was helpful for 254 workstations on a subnet...it uses netbios name / computer name for finding machines.
the process was converting computer names to MAC address...now this process is adopted to converting computer names to IP addresses...so NETBEUI renamed to NBT or NetBT.

in microsoft networks, it is useful for compatibility with old networks,for replacing it as a solution when DNS servers fail ( DNS server Converts DNS name like persiagulf.shahanshah.com to IP address 200.200.200.1 ).

persiagulf is a computer name and shahanshah.com is a domain name + suffix.

Thanks for your help. I think my main problem before was having the same name for both computers on the network. Once I changed one of their names I was able to find the server computer and it's files.

oooh! ok.
dont forget this useful command:
nbtstat -R