OT: Sharing files via YouSendIt

OT means "off-topic." So this isn't something that I would normally put on my blog. But I was going to send this info to a few people, and I thought folks on the blog might have some interest in it.

I'm going to give a basic tutorial on sharing files with the free version YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a service that's available in a free version and paid version with more bells & whistles. Link has the Pro account that we pay for, but I'm going to give the example of a free account. (For using the Pro account you don't need to do all the extra steps that takes up the bulk of this article.)

First register with YouSendIt. You know you are going to have to give up an actual email address to use this service. But it's worth it. They mostly use your address to send you useful info, like a confirmation that your upload is complete. Give them your email, then wait for their email confirmation to arrive. Once you get their email follow their instructions so that they will activate an account for you.

Once you have a free account, you can send one file upto 100MB in size. The way YouSendIt works is that you are using YouSendIt to send the file to someone else via their email. Really you are just sending them a notification that they can download the file from YouSendIt. You use their website to upload the file along with the email address of the person or persons that you want to send the file to. The person then gets an email with a link to YouSendIt. When he or she gets the email, they can follow a link to start downloading your file.

Now YouSendIt likes to work with one upload--so what happens when you want to send multiple files? As an example, I'll use sending an album from iTunes. With 10 or so music files in an album, it might seems like you have to send each song individually--that would be a pain and not worth the hassle. But there's an easy workaround that I know of on the Mac to easily send multiple files.

The workaround involves using the Zip technology built into the Mac OS. Zip is essentially a way to compress files. You can zip a single file or multiple files. Because most types of media, like MP3 or video, are already compressed, zipping the files doesn't actually make them significantly smaller. However you can use Zip to take several files and bundle them together into what Apple calls an Archive. So by taking an album and zipping the songs, we create a copy of the album that exists as one file. This single file (containing multiple songs) can then be uploaded to YouSendIt in one go.

So here's an example of how to do this with an album. First find the files that you want to send. It's easy enough to do with iTunes. By right-clickng on a song, use can use the "Show in Finder" command (the third item from the top in the contextual menu.) If your mouse only has one button, then you can hold down the Ctrl button while clicking to get the same contextual menu up.

The "Show in Finder" command will open up a window in the Finder showing where the file of the song is located. So now you see your song along with all the other songs in the album. Now we want to bundle all the files in this album into one single file. To do this, select all the files in the folder, then right-click again. This time you use the "Compress x items" (where x is the number of files that you've selected), the fith command from the top of the contextual menu.

After you've compressed your files, you'll see a new file in the same folder called "Archive.zip." This is a copy of your files collapsed into a single file.


This file called "Archive.zip" is the file that you want to send with YouSendIt. You can also compress or zip a folder. If you did this, then the compressed file would be named after the folder and not the generic "Arhive" that is used when you zip or compress multiple files. You can't send a folder via the free YouSendIt, but you can send a compressed version of that folder. Again, the free version of YouSendIt just wants a single file to send.

In this example, the file is 65MB, below the 100MB limit of our free service. Most compressed music is encoded at a bit rate of 128Kbps. At 128Kbps, 100MB equals about 1 hour and 50 minutes of audio. That's enough for a single album. However I've started buying music from Amazon, and Amazon encodes their music at a hefty 256Kbps. That means a 100MB is only about 55 minutes of music. So you may not be able to fit everything in one file. So if you want to send a group of files (like an album) and the total was over 100MB, then you wold need to split up your files into more than one archive, and each archive would need to be under the 100MB limit of YouSendIt and sent separately.

Another gotcha with music is that some music has DRM protection, meaning it can probably be only played on specific computers and other devices (like iPods) that are linked to a particular person. This isn't conducive to sharing music. iTunes is the last big player that is still selling lots of music with DRM. (This isn't about Apple but about the entertainment corporations--but that's the subject of another post.) iTunes has something called iTunes Plus, which is DRM-free music that you can buy (look for the plus icon next to the price of the music). All music bought from Amazon's download store is free of DRM--so they can be shared with anyone. Amazon has a pretty good store--it's nearly as easy to use as buying music from iTunes, and it's usually cheaper. Anything you rip from a CD is obviously DRM-free.

OK back to YouSendIt. Go to their website and log in using your account. Follow the link to send a file. Enter the email address or address of the person or persons that you want to get this file. Then click on the "choose file" button and select the Archive.zip file that you just created. Then click the "Send It" button. This actually starts the process of uploding the file to the YouSendIt website. This will take some time, and it's important not to disrupt the process. So you want to leave that webpage open and your web browser running until the file finishes uploading. Upload times are generally slower than download times. On my DSL it takes about 10 minutes to upload 50MB of data, but I can download that much in a fraction of the time.

Once the file is uploaded, an email will be sent to your buddy or buddies. Then it's up to them to follow the link to download the file. With the free verison, your file will be available for 7 days. So hopefully your friends will download soon instead of procrastinating.

Oh, you will probably want to delete the Archive.zip file now that it's uploaded. It's just a copy of your existing music that's taking up space on the hard drive.

If you are like me and you've been burning files onto disc to share with people, this method offers some advantages. One, there's no physical media to move around, either by hand or by mail. Two, you are helping the environment by not using up plastic to make a copy of your files, and in the case of mail, you aren't using fossil fuels to move a physical copy of the file around. So give it a shot, and let me know what you think of my method for sharing files.