Firefly (aka mt-daapd)

Firefly is a wonderful implementation of a DAAP server. What is DAAP I hear you ask? It's an audio streaming protocol introduced by Apple to allow you to stream music from one PC to another over a network. In simpler terms it lets you host all your music on your server and play them through iTunes (or some other apps).

Unfortunately, the version of Firefly in the Ubuntu repositories is a little old and stopped working for me when I recently upgraded my iTunes. Upgrading it wasn't as easy as normal in Ubuntu so I thought I'd list the steps I took:

• Uninstall the old version
  
  • sudo apt-get remove mt-daapd
• Delete configuration files and the database as they appear to be incompatible (YMMV).
  
  • sudo rm /var/cache/mt-daapd/songs.db
  • sudo rm /etc/mt-daapd.conf
• Download a recent build
  
  • wget http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org/dl.php?FILE=mt-daapd_0.9-svn-1586_feisty_i386.deb
• Install package
  
  • dpkg -i mt-daapd_0.9-svn-1586_feisty_i386.deb

Now reconfigure Firefly. There's probably a much better workaround than deleting the config files and the database but Firefly is so easy to set up that it's not worth figuring it out!

Thankfully, I can now, once again, play my music through iTunes from my Ubuntu server.