[sweetsdream]

My wife and I are slowly running out of Hard drive space on our iBooks. We both have huge music libraries (we ripped all our CD’s). I decided I would try to setup my Linux server that serves up files to our Macs via samba, to also share music. Instead of just moving our files to the server and adding the songs to our library I wanted to use the built in iTunes sharing instead. Most of the files for doing this are available for Linux but almost completely undocumented. Here is my walk through of how I got it working.

First let me state that this is not intended to do illegal music sharing across the internet this setup is only intended to allow you to share YOUR music with your family on the local network.

I’m assuming you have setup a Linux server for samba sharing or NFS. If you haven’t, there are a number of howtos and other resources on the web you can google. You will need to download a few files to your Linux server first. Apple uses a protocol called daap to share music libraries. Rendezvous is also used to announce the services available. You will need to download Apple’s Rendezvous multicast DNS advertiser (free registration) to make your Linux machine broadcast itself. You will then need to go to the daapd page and download all the appropriate files. I’m using Redhat 9 and everything compiled just fine on my computer. There is a sample configuration file included with the daapd server source code that you can edit and copy to /etc/daapd.conf.

Once everything is compiled, create a music folder on your samba server and copy some music to it. Next you will need to run the multicast DNS advertiser from Apple with the following line as root user:

Code:
 mDNSProxyResponderPosix 10.0.1.201 "Music Jukebox" _http._tcp. 3689 &

10.0.1.201 is the IP address of your server ans “Music Jukebox” is the name you will advertise to iTunes. Once that is running you can edit the /etc/daapd.conf file to match your needs with directory, server name and share name. Start the daapd daemon by typing this as root:

Code:
 daapd &

Once that is complete you can open iTunes and it should pop up as a shared music library.

This software is all in very early development so it doesn’t do things like handle Album covers or updates to the library. It has some bugs still but you can help the developers at the daapd page.

[m2bored]

Nice...Going to test this out this week.


Thanks,

m2

[galarneau]

That is too cool.

I'm currently building a PVR machine for all my multimedia fun (as in I have all the hardware, and am now working on getting the software setup)

I'm definitely going to try this out. It would be even cooler if it was available as a plugin into the MythTV project (http://www.mythtv.org)

Thanks for the heads up

[mike one]

thanks for taking the time to post this...
i'm sure lots of people will find it useful....

i just bought an old beige g3 for this very purpose at home, haven't implemented anything like this yet, been too busy playing with xmms, xmms remote, etc.....

[sweetsdream]

Originally posted by mike one:
thanks for taking the time to post this...
i'm sure lots of people will find it useful....

You're welcome. I am working on creating a startup script for this in Redhat so I don't have to start it manually. I did find that you may need to restart the daapd daemon if you add more songs to the library. Have fun.

[OreoCookie]

Thanx for the instructions.