Thank the Lord for Java. And iTunes. And college students. And newly-hired employees. All these sundry elements add up to one thing: a new and massive expansion of my home music library.

If you didn’t know about it already, the OurTunes utility (available for download either here or here), written in Java, takes advantage of iTunes’ ability to share one’s music library across a local network. Lots of people here share their libraries or playlists, and we have a pretty decent selection of different tastes and styles to choose from, should our own libraries seem stale on any given day. OurTunes allows you to save those shared files to your own hard drive, so that you can add them to your own library. (Along the way, I also found Coveralia, a great Spanish site that has high-resolution scans of CD jewel case inserts, and even disc art, in case you want your plunder to look as legitimate as possible when you burn it.)

I use OurTunes on my laptop to sift through the offerings of my colleagues, then merrily take my purloined items home to be imported into my iMac’s library. At least one other happy pirate and I gleefully sack each other’s music treasuries on a regular basis. One apparently undiscriminating fellow now has some 60GB of musical swag. I download some EMF and a previously unheard Devo track along with the last Gravity Kills album while somebody else helps themselves to my Einstürzende Neubauten. We are glutted and content, despite the RIAA’s insistence that for every song that is illicitly downloaded, a quadriplegic kitten dies in agony after being raped by drug-dealing terrorists.

As big and filled with Macs as our office is, the well had pretty much run dry; the entire building had been pretty thoroughly pillaged. Here and there, one might glean a previously overlooked track or two, like sharp-eyed but desperate carrion fowl swooping down to glean some infitesimal scrap off the dessicated bones of a lonely carcass. Now, though, like the Serengeti after the annual rains, the herds are swollen and fattened again by a large crop of newly-hired employees. The hunters rejoice again, as we run riot through new audio collections, greedily adding them to our bloated hoards.

Life is good again.