Running and iTunes Server From a Linux Box

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.

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Category: Note to Self

5 Comments on “Running and iTunes Server From a Linux Box”

  1. The only PITA we have found with sharing our music through Rendezvous ( at least what comes with Itunes by default ), is that you can’t create your own playlists from others music. You can listen to what they have in their playlists, but it’s a no go for if you want to create your own. Its something that I think should be implemented into iTunes as you’re still not copying the files, you just want to customize what you listen to.

  2. Interesting, I didn’t know that. I can at least in theory since I have control of the share, I can set up different playlists, etc.
    You can at least still sort by artist/album/genre right?