Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

iTunes music server on Linux

I've been very happy with the squeezebox and small computer setup I put together to store and listen to all my music. I ripped all the CDs I had and all the new ones I buy on my Powerbook, and then rsync them across the network to the computer, which stores them on its large 200Gb hard-disk.

The music is served to the squeezebox using SlimServer, using an HTTP-based protocol especially designed for serving music. While this works fine for squeezebox, another Mac machines in my house are not able to see the music stored on this computer. Ideally, this whole collection should be accessible to iTunes, which has a very nice interface.

Last night I did find a way to make that music collection accessible to iTunes. The program is called daapd, and is really amazing. I now have my dedicated music computer serve the same music collection to my squeezebox and to other iTunes applications running on macs around the house!

Setting up daapd on my computer running Knoppix was a bit more complicated than I had expected. However I got it up and running in three hours, after compiling all the necessary packages from source:

• SDL 1.2.8
• FAAC 1.24
• lame 3.96.1
• libid3tag 0.15.1b
• libmad 0.15.1b
• mpeg4ip
• howl 0.9.10
• Apple's mDNSResponder-58.8
• and finally daapd 0.2.4a

Compiling all the packages, except for Apple's mDNSResponder, was fairly standard. All of these free software packages use autoconf, so getting them to compile is a matter of running ./configure, make, and make install. Apple's package had to be compiled using make os=linux, after cd-ing in the mDNSPosix directory. Most of the time I spent was hunting down the packages and figuring the right order in which to compile and install them (the order above is the one you should follow).

The latest version of daapd was supposed to use howl to implement Apple's Rendezvous. I could not get it working, so I had to use Apple's mDNSResponder to do that piece. It's not a big deal, but I just thought I'd mention it here.