Playing Daap shares on Ubuntu Linux

published Mar 31, 2011 01:35   by admin ( last modified Mar 31, 2011 01:35 )

For the last month or so, Rhythmbox and Banshee have refused to play the music from my Daap shares (running the Firefly Daap server, a.k.a. mt-daapd), eventhough I can see and browse the shares.

Banshee works some of the time. I have now resorted to install Songbird under Wine, and it works fine. My guess is that something in the shared components between Rhythmbox and Banshee has been upgraded in a way that causes timeouts.

After a couple of hours of testing, here is what I have found so far:

There is a slight hickup in playback of each song, about 1.5 seconds into the song. Songbird locks up occasionally, seems to be related to accessing large Daap shares. Otherwise plain sailing.

Here is how to install Songbird on Ubuntu 10.10.

Install Wine if you haven't already.

Go to getsongbird.com and download Songbird for Windows.

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Start it with Windows program loader.

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I chose to import nothing since this is on Wine and all my music is on Daap anyay

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I chose to disable a lot of features that I do not need since there is always a risk that that particular feature will not be Wine compatible. Only the ones checked above were installed.

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Songbird has a built in web browser where you can search for plugins.

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Search for daap and download the more recent plugin.

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Restart Songbird and it should find your shares. In my case one of the computers needed a reboot before Songbird found all of the Daap shares on all computers.