Earlier this year I was looking for a way to set up music sharing for my flatmates. I knew that Rhythmbox supported DAAP sharing, so I set that up using the DAAP plugin and that was fine – my flatmate running Ubuntu on his laptop could access my library through his Rhythmbox (he shared his too), and my other flatmate could access it using iTunes on his Mac. DAAP sharing also works in Songbird with an extension, Banshee, and I believe Amarok too.
The only issue with this was that the DAAP server only ran when Rhythmbox was actually open, so it was a stroke of luck if we could transfer music and not get cut off when one of us closed our client.
I have an Ubuntu LAMP server running AjaXplorer which is an awesome web file management service, with user login and everything. Our router is also port forwarded so I can access my server, and hence the files on it, anywhere in the world – very handy. Since the server is running pretty much 24/7 (it’s nice and efficient and quiet because I installed fanless heatsinks and acoustic padding) and my music is on it as well, I figured I may as well make this a DAAP music share server.
Enter Firefly Media Server. It’s available in the repositories, so all you have to do to install it is run:
sudo apt-get install mt-daapd
To set it up is really easy, you just need to follow the instructions on the manpage. Basically, all we need to do is turn it on and then tell it where to look for some music. To start Firefly, run:
mt-daapd
Or alternatively, just reboot and it should start automatically. Once you’ve done that, open up a web browser and hit up:
http://127.0.0.1:3689
In my case, the server is set on 192.168.1.2 with a static IP, so I type in http://192.168.1.2:3689 to login. The default password is defined in /etc/mt-daapd.conf and you can just edit this file to change the password.
So once you login to the web interface you should see something like this:
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Here we can start and stop the server and see some statistics which should tell you if it’s running or not. If you click on configuration, you’ll see this:
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In this screen we can set up the scan interval, where to look for music, and change the login name and password, as well as the name of the server as it appears to other people in Rhythmbox and iTunes.
Once you’re all up and running, open up Rhythmbox and turn on DAAP sharing in plugins.
What I’d really like to know, is how I can stream my music from the server not just locally through LAN, but over the internet. If you have an idea how to do this, please let me know in the comments!