I have much of my legally purchased music on the computer, like most people these days. I have it as MP3s and share it between linux computers with NFS and with my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet using an Apache2 module.
I recently bought a Mac mini computer, in part with the intent of using it as a media centre in my living room, and I naturally want to play all my music on it, preferably without having to maintain a copy of everything on the mini.
Itunes can share music libraries through DAAP – Digital Audio Access Protocol – and various instances of Itunes find each other using BonJour – or ZeroConf – which is called Avahi on Linux.
Rhythmbox can share its music library using Avahi and DAAP but it really didn’t work that well, and I don’t want to be logged in and having Rhythmbox running all time, so I can listen to music in the living room.
Fortunately, there is mt-daapd, a multi-threaded DAAP daemon.
It works as a DAAP server, and advertises itself via BonJour, so Itunes clients on the local network can see it.
Until now it has worked very well.
It’s not i Debian, but a .deb can be downloaded directly the sourceforge project page. All that is needed is to download it, install it with
dpkg -i mt-daapd_0.2.4-1_i386.deb
edit the configuration file in /etc/mt-daapd.conf, mostly to tell it where the music is and under what name it should be published to Itunes. Then it can be started with
/etc/init.d/mt-daapd start
and you’re ready to listen to all you music on the mac.
UPDATE 2006-04-15 12:19
It still works well. The only nuisance after some time of use is that you cannot make playlists via iTunes, because iTunes seens the music as belonging to someone else.
With the above setup the daemon isn’t started automatically at boot. I had to run this command to achieve this:
update-rc.d mt-daapd defaults
Then it startes at boot and is shut down correctly with the system.
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