The combo drive on my iBook is hosed up. It's due to be fixed Real Soon Now, but meanwhile I can't hear things like the new cd my brother bought me for my birthday. So I thought, "Well I'll just put it in M's MacBook, rip it there and transfer the files via AFP"—except that just bugged me. Ripping the files on the other machine would mean having to add them to M's iTunes library, and she didn't like that music anyway, and wasn't there some way to use the remote drive as a source of audio data for iTunes on my machine?
Well, it turns out I didn't have to figure that out, because Apple Is Smart and Mac OS X Just Does the Right Thing in weird cases like these that you never thought you'd need to deal with. Specifically, I was able to share the cd in M's machine via AFP, and AFP intelligently showed me the audio cd as a directory full of aiff files! No needing to figure out how to convince my iTunes there was a cd drive at the other end. No needing to figure out how to get it to treat raw audio data (since you never configure that explicitly in iTunes, it just figures that stuff out for you, and how the heck does it do that anyway? —well, I don't need to know, and that's fine with me). All I had to do was import the aiff files into my iTunes library so it knew where they were, then rip them with iTunes-LAME onto my own hard drive.
So there I was, ripping the cd from one machine to the other, over the wireless network.
Isn't that neat?