Rhythmbox update

Dammit.

Rhythmbox uses a randomly-selected port also it seems. There also doesn't seem to be an option to select a port. What's wrong with 3689 anyway?

Ok - let's see what exaile can do...

EDIT: Exaile doesn't appear to do DAAP serving.

DAAP name sorting question

While I'm here, I have a question. I'd ask the firefly forums, but, like the program they purport to support, they are non-functioning.

When browsing music in iTunes (non-DAAP shared, just regular browsing), artists with their first and last names are sorted by their last name. I like this. However, when I am browsing a DAAP share in iTunes (OS X), artists are sorted by their first name. Then when you play a song from that artist it resorts it by last name - this makes iTunes think there are two artists (Yorke Thom and Thom Yorke, for example). This makes it virtually impossible to, for example, bring up a single artist and play all the songs therein, since it all gets sorted into the other, phantom, second artists. Grr.

This applied to mt-daapd, and it seems to apply to Rhythmbox too, so may be a general DAAP problem. How can I fix this? Any ideas, oh-so-wise internet hive-mind?

Rhythmbox

I am currently trying out Rhythmbox on my Ubunutu box to share mp3s.

Here's Rhythmbox's home page. You can install it with...

sudo apt-get install rhythmbox 

or install it from "Add/Remove..." box under Applications.

It claims to be inspired by Apple's iTunes, and this is visible in the layout of the application. It took a few clicks to load my library. And that took under five minutes to actually load. Nice. It does not have DAAP sharing in Edit > Preferences, as you'd expect (and where it is located in iTunes), but you have to go to the Edit > Plugins menu item.

"DAAP Music Sharing" was a pre-installed plugin that I simply had to enable. Clicking on configure brings up a box that you cannot fail to get right.

So far, it is working well. Though I have to remember to close the application, so it minimises to the menu bar at the top right and runs in the background, rather than quit the application, which stops the DAAP share also.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Tangerine

The first alternative I tried was Tangerine. It's a small application that does not run from the command line, but is a gnome app. You can get it by going to Add/Remove in the Applications menu and searching all sources for "Tangerine".

Here's Tangerine's homepage.

I had two problems with Tangerine:

1) It randomly selected a port to stream the music over. This made it impossible to use with a firewall - I hoped to be able to simply open port 3689, but no. However, if your network is set up so that all of your computers have an internal IP address (i.e., 192.168.x.x), this should not be a problem.

2) I have a large mp3 library (>18,000 songs). Tangerine didn't cope with it very well. It would only share about 4,000 songs, and there seemed to be no pattern as to which songs it excluded.

These two things might not be a problem for you, however. So give it a go.

Please suggest alternatives to mt-daapd

Oh yeah, forgot to mention...

If any of you out there in internetland have any alternatives to mt-daapd that you have found work well, please let me know in the comments. In this wat we can hopefully accumulate a list of applications that do the ever-so-simple job of streaming music over a network.

Comment's are open - no need to register (sorry for the captcha).

A new blog dedicated to detesting mt-daapd

Alright - I've had enough. I hate mt-daapd.

This piece of crap that is sometimes called "mt-daapd" (other times "Firefly") should be destroyed.

I've spent too much bloody time with this software, each time thinking it's up and running smoothly only to have it randomly crash. I really hate mt-daapd. It's just awful. In fact, it's so bad I'm starting this blog just so I can vent about this fact. It's poorly supported, the forums are useless, and the configuration is nightmarish.

This blog is not only a selfish cathartic excercise, however. This blog will also serve as a warning to people who are thinking of using mt-daapd (stop! don't do it!), offer alternative solutions to sharing music via DAAP, and guidance, all so that my mistakes are not repeated. I'm using Ubuntu, so this blog is written with Ubuntu in mind, but hopefully the suggestions will be generalisable to other Linux distributions.

If you've come across this blog, then it's likely mt-daapd/firefly has broken for you, also. So, if you're using Ubuntu (like me; 9.04 to be precise), here's my initial piece of advice:

sudo apt-get remove mt-daapd

sudo rm -r /var/cache/mt-daapd

sudo rm /etc/mt-daapd.conf

Alternatives and further rants forthcoming.