Last night I decided to convert one of the various laptops sitting round the house into an audio jukebox, plugged into my stereo, so I can listen to music in the lounge or garden when the powerbook is upstairs.
It was surprisingly straightforward. Firstly, I needed to get my music collection shared off the powerbook. Luckily, OS X has Samba built-in, so this is really trivial. In /etc/smb.conf, I added:
[music]
comment = iTunes files
path = /Users/savs/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music
browseable = yes
read only = yes
writable = no
locking = no
public = yes
oplocks = false
level2oplocks = false
Next, the intel laptop. I installed Debian stable, and in particular the autofs package. This will automatically mount the powerbook's music collection whenever it is needed. I added the following line to /etc/auto.misc:
music -fstype=smbfs ://Irvine/music
Now, whenever I do ls /var/autofs/misc/music/, the samba share is automatically mounted if it is not already available.
Because I've encoded everything in iTunes' m4a format, I'm using mplayer to play them. Debian packages are available from Christian Marillat's site.
All I need to do now is figure out how to get sensible playlists. I could do with a fancy GUI so I can run the laptop through the TV, and I guess that means an infrared pointing device would be useful too.
And yes, I am aware there's java clients such as AppleRecords that save all the hassle of sharing disks, that use the iTunes sharing facility instead. I discovered that about 5 minutes after configuring samba.
The laptop is called elmo, by the way.
Posted by savs at May 18, 2004 12:51 PM