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.

I recently found a fantastic website to get lyrics for songs: lyricwiki.org
No ads and plenty of lyrics available for free, even for italian artists or pretty unknown songs. I was also pleased to discover that the website offers an handy REST interface to fetch (or upload) lyrics from scripts update: I found a workaround to retrieve the lyrics without the banned lyricwiki API: read more here.

So I coded a script to fetch and update the lyrics for the selected songs in iTunes automatically. It cycles through all the selected songs and if it finds the lyrics on lyricwiki it puts them into the corresponding field of the iTunes track. I tested the script on my whole library and – after 5 minutes – most of my tracks had lyrics attached.

For that massive update task I found applescript to be a very quirky programming language. The folks at appscript realized this long before me and coded a ruby binding for the applescript object model.
Ruby was far more intuitive, and definitely replaced the need for applescript.

If you want to run the script you should also have the appscript and the curb (for curl support) gems installed: type this into a terminal to be up and running:

sudo gem install rb-appscript
sudo gem install curb

The script is available for download both as a plain .rb file and as a self-contained application (thanks to platypus)

Usage:

1. install the appscript and curb gems (one time)
2. open iTunes and select the songs you want to fetch lyrics for.
   hint: command-a selects all your library
3. execute the script:
   either launch the application
   or run ruby MassiveLyrics.rb inside a terminal

If you feel that your iPod hasn’t been the same as before after having all your favorite songs with lyrics, contribute the lyrics they don’t have on lyricwiki.org!

MassiveLyrics ruby script (OS X – win – linux)