For a while now I’ve been using IPodDisk to access the music tracks on my ipod (managed from my windows PC) from my iBook, to play them through iTunes. However this gets irritating when I buy new cds and rip them to my ipod, as I have to add the new albums manually into my iBooks’s iTunes library. At home, my ripped tracks are stored on a linux server’s filesystem which is samba shared with the windows box. The linux box runs mt-daapd (now called FireFly Media Server apparently) allowing my iBook to access tracks remotely, and it has the nice feature of periodically rescanning for additions, so I wondered if I could do something similar for when I’m away from home - a daap server running on my iBook serving tracks locally to iTunes.

I started initially looking at mt-daapd but didn’t immediately see any dmg packages for Mac OS X and I didn’t want to install Fink - the documented way to do it, so I looked around for alternatives and found Tangerine however it required Mono which caused sufficent load to make using my iBook painful.

Further googling lead to the Nighty mt-daapd build page which does have dmg packages. Installing the latest release at the time (Firefly-svn-1450) worked perfectly after I changed the path to the Artists directory of my Ipod disk. Another benefit to FireFly over Tangerine is a Status icon to turn it on and off.