Douglas F Shearer

Mac to Linux Streaming iTunes Using Skype

Since there isn’t a Linux version of Apple iTunes, I’ve been looking into other methods of streaming music to my workstation.

I basically want a system that works similar to what the Airport Express does. I want to control the music from my iBook, and simply stream it to my workstation over LAN. The workstation is connected to my speakers in another room, and would simply decode the stream.

After giving up the search, I was looking for something else, when I came across this Engadget how-to covering a method of accessing your itunes music library on your mobile phone.

I took the basic idea, and came up with this for streaming iTunes to my Linux workstation:

1. Install Cycling 74’s SoundFlower onto your system (Mac OS X Only). Make sure you restart after the install. It’s a small system plugin that appears as a sound device in the sound pane of System Preferences. Set both the input and output device in this pane to ‘Soundflower (2ch)’. In this way the Mac is fooled into using whatever sound would usually come out of the speakers as an input instead of the microphone.
2. Now install Skype on both your Mac, and your receiving system (This can be any OS that accepts Skype). Make sure you are signed in with two different Skype accounts.
3. Dial one machine from the other, what way round doesn’t matter.
4. Start iTunes or any other audio producing app on your Mac. Now any sound that you play on your Mac will be played on the speakers attached to your other system.

I tried this out with my iBook running OS X 10.4, and my workstation running Fedora Core 5 Linux. The sound quality isn’t the best, not as good as it could be, but bearable. Perhaps a LAN only audio streaming app would be better, as this would have a higher bitrate codec. Any suggestions?

Update

I thought I might be able to use VLC to stream the audio over my LAN, but turns out UDP unicast from a device isn’t supported under the OS X version. Would work fine from Windows → Linux etc, but not Mac → Linux. The search is still on…

Update 2

I’ve now tried Darwin Streaming Server, the open source version of the Apple Quicktime Streaming Server. This turned out to be way too bloated and complex, and would only let me point to files that the client could stream, rather than pushing a stream taken from a device (In our case the Soundflower ‘device’).

Downtime

My webserver was down for about 20 hours last night and today, this was while I updated it to Fedora Core 5. The update was successful and everything is back online.

I did have a few difficulties though; MySQL wasn’t liking one of the queries I use on my blog, i figured it must be something to do with the new version not dealing with lower and uppercase named columns in the same way. I re-wrote the query and now it works fine. Secondly, every time I logged into this site, it logged me straight back out again! I soon discovered that this was due to the server not being able to save PHP Sessions, as the folder pointed to by the session path didn’t exist! After creating the folder and setting the correct permissions, everything worked fine.

While I was at it, I took the liberty of naming my iBook, my workstation and my server, so as I can log into them without having to remember their individual IP addresses.

Update

For some reason YUM isn’t playing nice with me, so I don’t have GD image resize support at the moment. If any images are missing on any of my pages, it is because of this. I’m working to fix the problem now.

Update 2

Found a workaround for the problem (For those interested, the $releasever variable was returning Null to the .repos files, causing Yum to return errors. Solution was to replace every instance of the variable with a 5 in the repos), which has now allowed me to install GD. All running fine and dandy now.