Part of my quest to simplify my electronic life at home has been to shift all media other than photos off of my primary desktop and on to an external file server. This means that at my house, one doesn’t have to use my desktop to listen to music, watch TV shows we’ve ripped from purchased DVDs or movies we’ve done likewise with. The failing of this, of course, is that it’s not user friendly to pull up a music collection on a shared file server, and then try to reference the files in iTunes. You almost always get duplicates or missed tracks, and the delay between playing a song and hearing the music start can be maddening.

There, of course, is a solution to this. The FireFly Media Server, formerly known as mt-daapd. It uses mDNS broadcasting to show up in any copy of iTunes that’s running on the network, allowing anyone to easily play from the library stored on the file server in a native interface. It has the added benefit that when you leave the network, there are no traces of the music left on your computer – which makes my wife happy. The only downside is that you can’t make playlists from within iTunes – you have to go to a web interface to set those up. Happily, you can make smart playlists.

Sadly, I lost my build notes. I do, however, have links to other people who have gotten it working. It’s worth it, trust me. Especially when you hook up the speakers in the home office to an Airport Express, and anyone can stream music to it.

• http://www.barchard.net/files/firefly_on_solaris.html
• http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7245