chmt-daapd is an open source tool for Linux to stream music to a local network using Apple’s daap protocol. The Windows and MacOS client iTunes can access a music library served by mt-daapd using it’s „shared library“ feature. It’s using Apple’s zeroconf protocol, so no configuration is needed on the client side.
This enables you e.g. to keep all your mp3s on a single server in your subnet and access them from every PC or Mac simultaneously.
There is some documentation on the sourceforge project page but due to the early project stage it lacks some details. So here’s how I did it.
I mainly followed the tarball quickstart from the Docs section of the project page. Later I recognized the mandrake_howto contains some additional and needed steps but it didn’t work fully either.
Possibly you first have to download and install the dependant packages for „libid3tag“ or „gdbm“. This went easily the standard way with configure/make/make install.
But somehow compiling the mt-daapd source itself was a problem. I’m not sure whether this depended on the not-so-standard location of libid3tag and gdbm on my host after the setup: they both were in /usr/local/ instead of /usr/. Anyway, I got a lot of error messages during the compilation. Finally I came to these options for configure that worked for me:
./configure --with-gdbm-includes --with-howl-libs --with-gdbm-libs --with-howl-includes
Then make and make install and there’s a „mt-daapd“ binary in /usr/local/sbin. In the „contrib“ directory in the sources there’s an example for a mt-daapd.conf. Copy this to /etc and change it to match your needs.
Unfortunately executing the binary did nothing. No error message, no running process, nil. The parameter „-f“ should run it in foreground, but again no error message. After a lot of retries I invented the previously mentioned RTFLF™ : Read The Fucking Log File.
This is either the syslog or e.g. /var/log/mt-daapd.log (if you’ve configured it to use this) and there was an error message about it not being able to open it’s cache file or directory. This should be /var/cache/mt-daapd but didn’t exist. So I created it manually and mt-daapd started and worked fine.
There’s a start/stop script also in the contrib directory but that’s done for RedHat, so it should be modified a little bit. Here’s mine.
BTW, the browser configuration interface can now be accessed under http://hostname:3689
One problem still exists: It looks like mt-daapd doesn’t refresh it’s library when new music files are added to the folder it uses. You’ve got to restart it. But hopefully this will be fixed in one of the future releases.
This information is provided as is and I cannot guarantee it will work for anyone else. Use it on your own risk.
