freebsdguy

Sharing media over the network using iTunes media sharing is easy, but it’s even better when you can set up FreeBSD as  your backend media library server.  We can achieve this by using mt-daapd and mDNSResponder.

Start with my favorite 2 commands:

portsnap fetch
portsnap update

Install daapd:

cd /usr/ports/audio/mt-daapd/
make install clean
cp /usr/local/etc/mt-daapd.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/mt-daapd.conf

Edit /usr/local/etc/daapd.conf to configure the service.  Change Root to the location of your music and ServerName/DBName to whatever you like. It’s quite clear what you can/should edit, the least of which are these two lines:

ServerName      Shared Library
Root            /media/warehouse/audio

There’s also a line art_filename in which you can specfy your album art.  It’s experimental at best but occasionally works

Install mDNSResponder:

cd /usr/ports/net/mDNSResponder/
make install clean

Create the file /usr/local/etc/mDNSResponder.conf and edit it to look like this (the blank line in intentional):

FreeBSDGuy iTunes server
_daap._tcp.

3689

Add these two lines to /etc/rc.conf:

mt_daapd_enable=YES
mdnsd_enable=YES

Fire up the services:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mt-daapd start
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mdnsd start

Hopefully when you start iTunes you should see your new shared library!