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Some of you may remember my attempts to access or stream my iTunes music library to a linux box. I didn’t get much further with the project, especially as I didn’t really have the time.
Now a Linux project, Amarok has produced a solution. Amarok is a music player for linux that attempts to organise your library in a similar way to iTunes. A new feature in the latest version is Rendezvous sharing, which allows it to hook up to iTunes on another machine, and access the library. Problem solved.
Ok, after putting a post up on MacOSXHints I was pointed in the direction of Rogue Amoeba Software. The do a great little app called Nicecast which can take the audio output of a single app, and stream it out as an mp3 stream. After the initial setup (and opening port 8000 on my router), I was able to download a .m3u file, allowing me to listen to the stream on my linux box.
Problem solved? Eh, no! Nicecast comes in at $40, and I’m not really up for paying that much for lots of extra functionality that I’ll never use. I think I may have to look at making my own iTunes plugin. I smell a summer development project…
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Dial one machine from the other, what way round doesn’t matter.
- 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’).
Yesterday I while attempting to rename some video files in iTunes, I found that it hangs the whole iTunes apps for several minutes before the operation is complete. Why should this take so long?
To cut a long story short, I ended up with a corrupt iTunes Music Library file, resulting in iTunes crashing every time I tried opening it. Luckily I have been backing my entire home folder up on a weekly basis, so I don’t have to worry about loosing too much.
I do this by zipping my entire home folder into a gzip file, and storing it on my samba server. The terminal command I use for this is as follows.
$ sudo tar -cvzpf /Volumes/backup_location/backup/todays_date.tgz /Users/username
That is intended to be all on one line, copy and paste will pick this up. You’ll be prompted for an your administrator password, then it will get to work. Insert your own location and username to complete this. If you have many users you can always zip the entire users folder. The date is just a personal preference so I can keep several weeks worth of backups.
This has saved me once so far, and is definitely worth doing.
As you can see, along with all the info at the bottom of my posts, I have added some stars for ratings. There is no connection between these and the backend as yet, but I’ll get that working later on.
The new backend is looking good, with the blog being powered by it already. An object orientated approach does make for some extra processing overhead, but it’s worth it for the ease of organisation, and control over what different elements of the system can do.
Update
Ratings now work! My iTunes inspired ratings stars look pretty nifty, and actually work now! Now onto creating the gallery I’ve been talking about for so long…
