undertakingyou

So, yesterday I talked about setting up the DAAP server Tangerine. Now I want to talk about a client music player that supports it.

Banshee is supposed to support DAAP. You are supposed to be able to just fire up banshee and see any shares that are out there. I couldn’t get it to find the share. It didn’t matter what port I used on the server or if I had ufw disabled or not. IPTables rules opening that port in and out for both protocols changed nothing. Have no idea why it isn’t being seen and you can’t force banshee to look in a certain place. ((Update, I restarted my laptop and Banshee sees the share now. Who knows for how long.))

Rhythmbox supports DAAP. It also allows you to specify a location. So Rhythmbox is what I have been using. Which is a bummer because my default player is banshee. However, despite not liking Rhythmbox much and being very used to something else I easily connected to the DAAP server and have been enjoying my music collection wherever I am in the house. This experience has increased my respect for the player.

Exaile is a music player that I have been playing around with lately. One of the lead devels is a friend of mine. It is a simple player who’s goal is to be a gnome version of Amarok built using python. It has just recently been released at 0.3.0.1 and thus far does not support DAAP. I think that I am going to try and write the DAAP extension for it though.

So, there is my experience connecting. If there are some other players that you know that work with DAAP I’d like to try them. So let me know.

So, I have a pretty comprehensive music collection. At least I think it is. My wife and I each had a nice collection of CD’s and upon married the two collections joined also. Then iTunes and other downloadable music websites came along and BANG, the collection grew by leaps and bounds.

I find myself on my laptop a lot. It is nice because I can move around with my daughter, go outside . . . we all know the benefits of the laptop and wireless. With this mobile lifestyle I still want my music wherever I go. So comes the benefits of DAAP.

So basically a DAAP share is a streaming music share, that shows you all available songs and then streams them to your computer.

First I tried mt-daapd. It sucks. Really, I would never use it again. It didn’t matter how often I told it to rescan my collection it only found 287 songs. A far cry from the thousands that I do have.

In swoops Tangerine. It is a lightweight DAAP server with a gui front end. Just say where the music is and that you want to share it. With the music location you have a couple options. You can specify a folder, specify a music players library (such as banshee or rhythmbox) or you can just have beagle tell it about all music files and it will share them. Viola you are done! Just use your music player on your local box to access the share (More on that tomorrow).

Downsides of Tangerine:
* when using the gui it does not specify a port. It uses a random one which makes it hard if you need to punch wholes in a firewall. Easy workaround. Don’t use the gui. Edit the .tangerine file in your home dir and you will see the port directive. Then just run ‘tangerine’ at the command line or via an app launcher.
* For some reason Not all the tags are properly handled on the client. So it shows all my music. And most has all the right tagging. But some is unknown artist with known album titles and some is just unknown. I don’t know why it does that so if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them.

So, one of the features that I really really have enjoyed about banshee is the full screen mode when playing music. What is so nice about that? Well, it disables my screensaver and then shows a very nice picture of the cover art, and shows the song name, artist and album.

I have used this as background music for company. Everyone can see it and enjoy not only the music but see who it is if they are interested.

Turning on full screen mode is easy. When playing music go to the ‘Now Playing’ tab and then just click ‘Full Screen’. To close it just click ‘Leave Full Screen’. It is a cool little feature that easily turns my computer into a multimedia center.

So, with banshee 1.4 released and several people talking about it I thought I could throw my thoughts into the mix.

I was an amarok user. Loved it, still do for a lot of things. And really, it has more features than banshee. But why I like banshee more, and use it now, is that I met the developers. I met Aaron, Gabe and Sandy at the Utah Open Source Conference this year and had the opportunity to get to know them. They are some cool guys. And although banshee isn’t there yet, the vision and direction of the project is something I really like.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the amarok guys aren’t cool. They just aren’t my facebook friends.