Music lovers too anxious to wait for Penn State's proposed music download service already have an alternative to illegal downloads.

One key feature on iTunes, a free program available on Macintosh and Windows operating systems, allows users to access others' music libraries and play songs across a local network.

The songs cannot be downloaded to a personal computer but can instead be played in streaming audio format.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said iTunes sharing is "just listening to the other person's music."

Users on the same networking subnet can share libraries on iTunes, which can consist of MP3s or songs ripped from CDs, Dowling said. A networking subnet in a University Park dormitory would consist of a few dozen computers with similar IP addresses.

Andrew DiSabitino (senior-civil engineering) uses iTunes sharing through a local network at his fraternity house, Delta Upsilon, 229 Locust Lane.

"I don't even know how I'd improve upon it, it's great," he said.

DiSabitino said he has used iTunes on his Macintosh PowerBook for some time, but with the Windows release of the program, his housemates are now able to share music libraries with him.

"It's leaps and bounds above Winamp and Windows Media Player," which he said his friends used to use before iTunes.

Russell Vaught, associate vice provost for information technology, said the iTunes sharing service is "legitimate," but for a student to legally stream a song from another student, the original file must have been legally obtained.

"Students who choose to share music should be very careful not to violate any copyright laws," he said.

Tony De Los Angeles (sophomore-political science) began using the sharing feature of iTunes on his Windows laptop shortly after the software was released for the platform on Oct. 16.

If a student imports songs from a CD he owns, then he is entitled to use iTunes sharing to stream those songs to other users, Vaught said.

De Los Angeles said he uses a password on his shared library so that only his friends have access, but he said some of the shared libraries he accesses are not password-protected from others in his networking subnet.

iTunes "is a lot better than what I used to use, which was Winamp," he said.

He said he enjoys the program's ripping capabilities. The self-proclaimed "CD fiend" with a few hundred CDs has found it is more practical to import the files onto his hard drive than to bring the discs to school.

Dowling said library sharing is an important feature of the program.

"We built [sharing] into the software so people can use it," Dowling said.

Documentation for iTunes states five users can connect to any given computer at a time, and users must tweak firewall settings to allow sharing.

DiSabatino also said when he takes his laptop out of the house and connects to another network, others in the house can no longer access his music. He said he thought the system would be helpful on campus, where desktop users' computers are nearly always on and are always connected to the Penn State network.

The free download of iTunes 4.1 is available at www.apple.com/itunes for Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows 2000.

The program organizes and plays MP3 files, imports and burns CDs, and contains the iTunes Music Store, which Apple says offers 400,000 songs for 99 cents each.