mt-daapd, aka firefly, allows to serve a music folder directly to any iTunes running in your home network. This is great to share music across the house or to keep a music dump folder aside from your main itunes library.
I personally use firefly to serve an enormous ‘music dump’ folder which I keep on the NAS server, so that I am not forced to have all these songs into my iTunes library on my mac HD. This folder is for casual music i listen from time to time, and if I find some gem in it, I copy it on my main library to sync with ipods and iphone.
Installation in ubuntu is very simple: just
sudo apt-get install mt-daapd
and start the daemon by running
sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daapd start
If you want the program to start every time your server boots up execute the following:
sudo update-rc.d mt-daapd defaults
Now you should see in your iTunes a new shared library, like this:
firefly server as seen by iTunes
Now we are ready to configure a folder on the server for sharing. To do this there is the configuration file /etc/mtdaapd.conf, however it is more straightforward just to use the web interface at port 3689 on your server. The username is admin and the password is mt-daapd.
From the web interface you can set up the daemon and in the configuration section you can specify your music folders to be served. Just remember to make it perform a scan after you add something new. To be sure I configured some periodic scanning to go off every hour.
Performance of the server is very good. The library behaves as if it were local, if not even better.
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