I have to set up my Linux box as an iTunes music server. I played around with it a bit but the instructions “get Rendezvous” didn’t go into much detail on what to do with it when you got it (no, it’s not blindingly obvious). My grant plan is twofold.
First of all, ignore for a moment that any day (translation: Real Soon Now) I’ll be getting a powerbook through work. Ok, so I want to put my gumdrop iMac in the living room hooked up to the reciever that sucks far less than the iMac’s speakers. So all nice good sound goes from the iMac through the good speaker system.
Then, set up my mp3 fileserver with the iTunes sharing protocol implemented so that all my songs are seen by iTunes transparently across the network.
The end result of this is that people in the living room, say at a party or kitchen or whatever can listen to music from a large collection with all the nice built in bonuses of things like playlist, etc. It also means I don’t have to build a box (having something that is self contained and with a small(ish) footprint is nice 🙂
I have had it working with just mounting the mp3 server SMB share with the MacOS finder and accessing the files that way, but that means running the finder to mount the share each time (I don’t know applescript so hacking out my own version of “reconnect on boot” was a PITA) and besides, it’s nifty technology to play with. In addition to that, with the new powerbook I’ll be able to access my music from work (firewalled of course 🙂
If I get it working I’ll try to write up a better HOWTO that people like me can understand.