Debian Administration

Broadcasting Music with daapd

DAAP (pronounced daaaaaaap and stands for Digital Audio Access Protocol) is a proprietary protocol created by Apple. It allows you to share a directory of music so other people can listen to your songs without the hassle (or illegality) of downloading them to your own computer. It utilizes multicast DNS, or rendezvous, or zero-conf networking, or whatever the current buzzword is for that technology. Think of mDNS as peer-to-peer DNS -- so whenever you jump on a network, your mDNS enabled programs broadcast all over the networking looking for other mDNS programs and they couple together and have a great time.

The most common application that uses daap is iTunes. There are, however, a few other applications for Linux that offer the same functionality.

What I'll be showing you is how to set up a daapd server so you can have a central music repository quick and easily.

First, installation. Ready for it? Here it comes...

apt-get install daapd

whew.

It'll most likely also want to install mdnsresponder, too. You also might want to toss in some other music libraries like ogg or aac while you're at it. mdnsresponder is the guy that will handle all the mDNS stuff for you. There isn't much to that package. There's a configuration file but not really any documentation on what to do with it. That really doesn't matter though since all you need to do is start it up and never worry about it again.

Next, you'll want to edit your /etc/daapd.conf file. The options are all self-explanitory and have good descriptions. One thing you'll want to do, though, is get rid of any .m3u playlist files. I noticed that this causes applications to crash for some reason -- which is unfortunate because applications that support m3u through daapd will automatically show you the playlists in the application. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later version.

After you're all done with that, start daapd up with a good 'ol

/etc/init.d/daapd start

If your music directory is quit big, it'll take a while for the initial scan. Once that's all done, fire up your client application (like iTunes) and your host should pop up in the menu.

And that's it.

It's also worth noting that you can't copy songs to your own computer via DAAP, per se. DAAP works via HTTP and if you're sneaky, you could always use something like wget. But you didn't hear that from me or him..

Here's some daapd references:
daapd homepage
daap wiki


Have fun!