Access Your Entire iTunes Library from Your Mobile Device

Those of you who use or support the iPhone (News - Alert) or iPad can run into one limitation—lack of space. The largest-capacity iPhone currently offers 32GB of storage, while the iPad (and iPod Touch) can go as high as 64GB. But if you store a lot of files in iTunes that you’d like to have available on your mobile device, you can easily run out of space. Fortunately, there are a couple of solutions.

Apple’s (News - Alert) upcoming iCloud service is designed to let you house your iTunes content in the cloud so that it’s always available and doesn’t eat up local storage space.

But until and even when iCloud is available, there is another option. A company named Stratospherix offers mobile apps that allow an iOS device to directly access an iTunes library or other content on a PC or network. For iPad users, the company sells a $3.99 app called FileBrowser. And iPhone users can grab a $2.99 app called NetPortal.

Both apps work as remote file browsers, letting you wirelessly connect to a computer or network drive to access your iTunes library as well as other folders. You can browse those folders just as you would browse the folders on your local PC or a network share. You can then view or open a variety of different file types right on your mobile device, including photos, podcasts, videos, audio files, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and more.

The apps can work over either Wi-Fi or 3G. If your mobile device is on the same network as the remote PC, then the connection doesn’t require any special setup. But if you want to access a PC or network that sits behind a firewall, you’ll need to establish a VPN connection or some type of port forwarding. The apps also support both Windows PCs and Macs.

Overall, the apps are fairly simple to set up. I installed FileBrowser on my iPad so that I could access the iTunes library stored on my NAS drive as well as certain documents on my desktop PC. To do that, I just created two new machine connections where I entered the name or IP address and my username and password for the host computer. Tapping on the new connection then opened a file browser window on my iPad where I could see the major network shares on my NAS drive and desktop.

The connection for my NAS displayed the share and folders for my iTunes library. By drilling down into each individual folder, I was able to view its contents and open many of the files. FileBrowser’s built-in viewer can display a healthy array of files but it doesn’t support everything.

Viewing my iTunes content, FileBrowser was able to open and play mov and m4v video files, m4a and mp3 audio files, and PDF files. But it was not able to read audiobooks saved as m4b files or electronic books saved as epub files. Accessing my desktop PC, the app fared better as it was able to read Word documents, Excel files, PowerPoint presentations, HTML files, and a variety of graphic images, such as JPG, GIF, and TIF files. I especially liked the way FileBrowser’s viewer formats Word document and PDF files, making it easy to read such files page by page. I also appreciated the app’s ability to display photos in a slideshow format so I could view each image one by one.

Beyond just viewing files stored on a PC or network share, you can manage them. FileBrowser gives you the ability to copy, move, rename, and delete files or entire folders. It also lets you email any file as an attachment or print it if you’ve set up the capability to print from your iPad.

Though I’m using FileBrowser on my iPad for now, NetPortal shares the same features and functionality for iPhone users. Those of you who’d like to test the app without shelling out any money beforehand can download and install a free lite version of NetPortal. The free version won’t let you open or view any files, but it will let you test connectivity to your iTunes library or other remote shares to ensure that the connection will work in your environment.