This is a quick and dirty guide to installing Firefly Media Server (formally mt-daapd). It is neither comprehensive nor particularly readable. Hopefully, though, it's good enough.

Overview

The things necessary to install Firefly Media Server are as follows:

Downloading Dependencies

The only things necessary to install Firefly Media Server is libid3tag, the library used for ID3 tag reading, and gdbm. Libid3tag is part of MAD (http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/), the MPEG Audio Decoder. GDBM will almost certainly be provided by your distribution... even if you use one as goofy as, say, Solaris. Install this package in the manner appropriate for you distribution (fink install libid3tag on Mac OSX, emerge libid3tag on gentoo, etc).

Downloading Firefly Media Server

Download the Firefly Media Server tarball from the "files" section of the SourceForge Project Page. The default ./configure; make; make install should suffice.

If your id3tag headers or libraries are not in /usr/include and /usr/lib, then you must use the --with-id3tag= to help the configure system locate those. For example, on Mac OSX, using libid3tag installed from fink, the id3tag headers are in /sw/include, and the libraries are in /sw/lib. The appropriate configure command would be "./configure --with-id3tag=/sw".

You might also want to install libid3tag-devel to have this header file.

Configuring Firefly Media Server

Installing via Tarball means you have to install the configuration files yourself however they can all be found in the contrib folder for the tarball.

cp contrib/mt-daapd.conf /etc/mt-daapd.conf

/etc/mt-daapd.conf is well-documented, and the documentation included in the file should suffice for setting up the server. At a minimum, you must change the entry for mp3_path to point to the directory that includes the MP3 files you wish to share. You may want to change the entry called admin_pw to a non-default password. This is the password to the web administration portion of the DAAP server. If you want to require a password when listening to music shared from the DAAP server, set a value for the password option. iTunes users connecting to the DAAP server will then be required to use that password.

NOTE: If you did a straight ./configure, and not ./configure --prefix=/usr, then your web_root will be /usr/local/share/mt-daapd/admin-root, not /usr/share/mt-daapd/admin-root. You'll need to correct this in your config file.

cp contrib/mt-daapd.playlist /etc/mt-daapd.playlist

The playlist file is also well commented, leave it as it is until you have a working setup and then have a play.

To make the system start at boot, you will have to make a SysV init script, or other startup script as is appropriate to your distribution. the Firefly Music Server script in the contrib directory is an init script specifically for RedHat, but might be modified to suit your needs. If you come up with an init script more appropriate for you distribution, please contact me, and I'll link to it from this page, and include it in the contrib directory.

cp contrib/mt-daapd /etc/rc.d/init.d /sbin/chkconfig --add mt-daapd

At this point, you should be able to start the DAAP server with the startup command appropriate for you distribution. Let it run for a while to index all the MP3 files, and in a couple minutes, you should be able to connect to the server from an iTunes client.

Once you can see the DAAP server on the local network from iTunes, then you can look at the web administration page, as well. Open a web browser and head to http://your.ip.address:port. For example, if your server was at 192.168.0.3, and your port was configured in mt-daapd.conf to be 3689 (the default), you would go to http://192.168.0.3:3689. You will be prompted for a username and password. Use any username, and the password specified as "admin_pw" in the config file (default is "mt-daapd").

Quickstart Tarball (last edited 2007-09-26 11:55:15 by 203-214-76-254)