I’m at work listening to my entire iTunes music collection on my iPad.  “So what?” you say.  Well, what if I told you there is no music on my iPad.  And my iTunes music collection is on another computer, in another city, eighteen miles away from my office.  Have I got your attention?  How is this possible?  Audiogalaxy for iPad.  Audiogalaxy is a free app that allows you to stream your entire iTunes music collection (even your playlists) from your home PC to your iPad so long as you are connected to the Internet.

I had been using Apple’s home sharing feature to stream music from my iMac to my iPad, however the home sharing feature requires both your main PC and your iPad are on the same network.  Therefore, when I left my home to go to my office I lost the ability to stream music from my home based iTunes library.  As great as Apple’s home sharing is, the fact that it requires both your PC and iPad to be on the same network limits its usefulness for people who like to take their music on the go.

Audiogalaxy solves this problem by allowing streaming between PCs and iPads on different networks.  Audiogalaxy doesn’t care that your home PC is on one network and your iPad is on another.  As long as both are turned on and connected to the Internet you are good to go.  All this talk about networks means this must be complicated to set up right?  Wrong, the set could not be any easier.  Within minutes of downloading the app I was streaming music to my iPad.

Of course all this would be meaningless if the interface was clunky and the app was slow.  Fortunately the Audiogalaxy app is very well designed and works great.  Audiogalaxy automatically sorts your music by artists, albums, genres, and playlists.  You can even use the Audiogalaxy app to search your entire music library which is great if you have a large music collection and are looking for one particular song or album.  Audiogalaxy also sorts everything for you in alphabetical order and has thumbnails of the album artwork next to all song titles.  Pick a song to play and the album artwork appears larger in the Audiogalaxy player.

The load times are quick and the sound quality is very good.  There is actually an option in the Audiogalaxy settings menu to turn high quality audio on or off.  Audiogalaxy says “when on, music will sound better but you may encounter skips”.  I have been listening to high quality audio exclusively and I have yet to experience any skips.

Another nice touch is the social integration Audiogalaxy has added to the app.  While a song is playing within the Audiogalaxy app, there are little icons for Facebook and Twitter.  Press the Facebook or Twitter icon and you can post to your wall or tweet about the music you are listening to.  Posting a song you are listening to on your Facebook wall automatically adds a photo of the album artwork.

In case you think you’ve heard of Audiogalaxy before, it is because you have.  Audiogalaxy was a P2P file sharing app that was highly regarded back in what I call the “Wild West” days of music downloading around 2000 when everyone was sharing songs (albeit illegally) on music sharing programs such as Napster.  Eventually, (like Napster) Audiogalaxy had to shut down their great music sharing site.

That being said Audiogalaxy is now back in a new, incredibly useful way providing a great free service to music lovers.  The amazing thing is this app is in a “beta” stage so it will only get better with time.  If you are at all interested in streaming your music library to your iPad, this app is a must have and highly recommended.