DAAP Music Sharing and Exaile

I’m pleased to announce that Exaile gained a new developer last week – Aren Olson. Aren has been contributing here and there for a while now, and as of last week with his new plugin, daap-share.py. What is DAAP you might ask?

Imagine that while at work, you could load up Exaile and connect to your collection running on your machine at home, search through it just like you search through your local collection, drag some tracks over to your playlist and listen away.

You can now, and here’s a little how-to on getting it set up under Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn).

I’m pleased to announce that Exaile gained a new developer last week – Aren Olson. Aren has been contributing here and there for a while now, and as of last week with his new plugin, daap-share.py, I asked him if he wanted commit access. What is DAAP you might ask?

Imagine that while at home, you could load up Exaile and connect to your collection running on your machine at work, search through it just like you search through your local collection, drag some tracks over to your playlist and listen away.

With Aren’s plugin you can, and here’s a little how-to on getting it set up under Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn).

DAAP is the protocol that Apple uses in iTunes to allow different users of iTunes on a local network to share their music with each other.

Aren has created a Feisty repository for Exaile’s svn (which also contains Tangerine [a DAAP server]), which he keeps pretty up to date, so first things first, you’re going to want to add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42 feisty exaile-svn
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42 feisty reacocard

and then run the following:

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/8434D43A.gpg
sudo apt-key add 8434D43A.gpg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install exaile python-daap tangerine python-avahi

Start up Exaile by going to Applications->Sound & Video->Exaile. If this your first time running Exaile, you will be prompted to add some directories to your collection. Do this, and wait for it to complete scanning.

Open up a terminal, and type tangerine-properties. Check the “Enable music sharing” box, the “Find in” radio butt, and choose Exaile from the dropdown. This will start Tangerine, which will begin serving up music from Exaile’s library.

In Exaile, go to Tools->Plugins and select the “Available Plugins” tab. When the list finishes loading (which can take a minute), select the checkbox next to the “Music Sharing” plugin, and click the “Install/Upgrade” button. Close the plugin manager.

You will now see a new tab on the left called “Network”. In the dropdown at the top, you should see your local tangerine share (which will be an IP and a port number, something like 66.79.34.24:52106), and then “Custom Location”. If you are working in an office with people who are running iTunes, you might also see their shares. You can connect to any of these, so long as you have the password, and browse them like they were your own collection.

Now, if you write down that IP and port for your local share, when you get home from your office, you can follow this guide again to get Tangerine and Exaile up and running, choose “Custom Location” from the dropdown in network, and type the IP and port of your work share. AWESOME.

Note, this assumes that you don’t have a firewall at work… you may need to forward a port or something, but I’ll leave that part to you. The hard part is done…. thanks Aren!