Home Audio Streaming with Rhythmbox
Saturday 16 August 2008 - Filed under Default
Ever since I ripped my music collection to MP3 format and began collecting MP3s online, I’ve been struggling with managing and listening to all this music. In the past I’ve used WinAmp and iTunes on Windows XP to manage music locally. I’ve used Edna(a python script) to serve the music using its built in web server. Finally, I’ve copied this 30GB library a few times only to delete parts of it as I need the space on various machines.
Each of those setups feels like a kludge compared to my current Rhythmbox setup. I’m running Ubuntu and Windows XP on my computers at home and have found using Rhythmbox to store and serve my music has been the best experience so far.
To share music, start Rhythmbox on the computer that’s storing it all. Go to Edit -> Plugins and check the box next to DAAP Music Sharing. Then click Configure on the right and check the box next to “Share my music”.
Then if you want to listen to the music on any other computer, start Rhythmbox and go to File -> Connect to DAAP share and enter the name of your music server. Right away it’ll pull down a list of files and you can begin searching, playing, and queuing up songs right away.
One tweak I’d recommend is on your server to have Rhythmbox watch your music folders. This helps when you have a program like bashpodder downloading your podcasts for you on a daily basis. Go to Edit -> Preferences and the Music tab and check the box to “Watch my library for new files”.
If you use iTunes, stop. If you can’t stop using iTunes, you’ll be pleased that it’ll auto-detect these DAAP shares so you can play it all from machines upon which you don’t have Rhythmbox.
In theory you could even share this music to your computer wherever you are by opening a port on your router and using dyndns but I’ve not tried this. I would suggest setting a password on the DAAP share if you do.
One thing I might like to do is to connect remotely via ssh for increased security. If you have any ideas on that, please leave a comment. Also if you know of other free software audio clients that connect to DAAP shares I’d like to hear about those as well so people on Windows or OS X can enjoy more freedom in their software. Above all, enjoy your audio where you want, when you want!
2008-08-16 » David Sterry