[SpyderMike]

Okay, I am not an Apple guy - my wife is Apple and I am Linux and PC, but I have to tech support it, so bear with me. I just copied a song from my wife's iTunes on her MacBook Pro using Finder by going into her iTunes Music folder and just copying and pasting it. It was .mp3. I copied it over to my network external harddrive in a general folder - copied it though my network. I am streaming it now. I just went to the harddrive which is shared over my network and played it from my two different PCs in my house. No iTunes on either devices. I also located the file using finder on my wife's MacBook Pro and played it using here iTunes. Hers is set up to no suck any music it finds/plays into iTunes.

Essentially, once you get the music out of iTunes and onto a shared/public harddrive on your network you can access them and play them on any device or use a music server on that drive or network. AppleTv should be able to find it and play it too - without iTunes I would imagine as the AppleTV is design to stream most formats of audio/video and sources other than iTunes. I have a Roku and I can find this song and play it now.

There are several software music servers - I use Logitech Media Server (LMS), but there is Twonky, Plex and others (to name just a few). Most of them are free. Then you need an app - other than iTunes to be a player. For example, I have an old iPad 1 that was a gift that I use as a music controller. I have an app called Squeezepad that works with LMS and controls it or bluetooths music to a Fugoo wireless bluetooth speaker.