Ubuntu Blog

Share Music in a Network using Avahi (DAAP) September 22, 2006

Okay, so I have a desktop with around 50 Gigs of music. I also have a laptop on which I work most of the time, from various places in and around the house. I did not want to (and don’t have the space to) copy the songs onto the Laptop. So I went looking for a simple way to share my music over the Network.

I found that rhythmbox supports DAAP, the same technology that Apple uses with iTunes to enable sharing.

To enable sharing, install the avahi daemon on the desktop using:
$sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon

Now, in Rhythmbox, go to Edit->Preferences->Sharing(which is a tab) and select “Share my music”.

Avahi is the name of the project that brings DAAP (aka rendezvous or zeroconf) to Linux.

You’re all set! Now when you use Rhtyhmbox on the laptop, or any other system in your network, the music collection on the desktop should appear when you start it up in the “Source” pane on the left! Og’s post was one of the many pages I hit when I was searching for a solution. He even has a screenshot showing how the shared directory shows up.

If you want to share music using Banshee, install the banshee-daap package which provides a plugin for DAAP music sharing.

The only caveat is, even when you use this, Rhythmbox has to be running on your desktop for the files to show up elsewhere. If that bothers you, then see how Tangerine can help you. From the website, we get the following description:

Tangerine is an application that allows you to publish music over the local network, using DAAP. It runs on both Linux and Windows. There are several clients that you can then use to connect to it, such as Apple’s iTunes, Banshee, and Rhythmbox.

Music files can be specified either by a directory, or can be automatically discovered using Beagle or Google Desktop. Recently you can also specify which music player you use and share the songs in it’s collection. For typical configurations, a graphical tool is included (see below).

As far as I know, the stable version of Amarok, my favorite music manager, does not have any support for DAAP, either as a server(for the desktop) or as a client(for other computers to access shared stuff).