At home, I run a Windows XP machine and my wife runs a Mac. One thing we wanted to do is put all our music in a single place so we can access it from our preferred music players… iTunes for her, Winamp for me.

Since my computer has the bigger hard drive, it made the most sense to put it there, so here are the steps I did to make connection as easy as possible:

1. On my computer (Windows, the “server”), I shared the folder containing the music files and set the security options to allow “Everyone” both full control in sharing permissions (Sharing tab > Permissions) and in the file system security settings (Security tab).
2. Next, in order to allow her to connect without a password, I enabled the “Guest” account on my machine.
3. Now all I had to do was connect her Mac to the share, so I followed this article on Apple’s site. Also, I made sure I set the connection profile as a favorite for easy access.
4. Easy enough, she is now able to fully control her music on my machine.

Note: The security settings I did above opened the music share up to full control for everyone. If you have a wireless network, make sure it is locked down to prevent “rouge” connections.