How To Stream Music Over Network To Songbird Or Itunes W/o Itunes

[darkNiGHTS]

After much searching and testing, I have figured out a pretty solid way to stream music from one computer to another over the network and access the share via Songbird or iTunes. This will allow you to do things such as having your music on your desktop computer, but listen to it in another room in the house on your laptop without wasting the space. Also, it is nice to be able to have an iTunes compatible share, but not to have iTunes running all the time. Firefly server uses a measly 2MB of RAM on idle. For this guide I will refer to two computers; the host is the one that will stream the music and the receiver is the one that will play the music.

Needed for this guide:

• Songbird - http://getsongbird.com/
  
• Firefly Nightly 1696 (tested) - http://nightlies.fireflymediaserver.org/ni...0(svn-1696).exe
  
• A network, wired or wireless
  

Steps

1. First, install Songbird on the receiver computer. It is not necessary to have it on the host computer.
   
2. Install "Songbird DAAP client" by opening this page in Songbird and pressing "install"
   http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1355
   This allows Songbird to connect to the server that we will create. After installation, it is necessary to reboot Songbird a few times to activate the plugin.
   The version that I used when making this guide was 0.2.5
   
3. On the host computer, install the Firefly nightly that I have linked above. Run through the install as usual and open the server when the installation is done. It should be a small orange icon on the right side of your taskbar. To get to the options, double click on it.
   
4. From here you can configure many necessary aspects of the server. The first tab library has a few important options.
   
   The options are pretty self explanatory. "Library name" sets the name that you will see on the receiver computer. "Media Location" is the path where your music is located. And you can protect your library with a password if you'd like. Keep in mind that anyone connected to the same network as you and with iTunes installed can listen to your music unless you password protect it. Most will not mind this.
   
5. In the next tab there are some less important settings.
   
   Here you can set it to start up with Windows or change the port it is using. If you don't know what the later means, don't worry about it, you probably won't need to change it. You can also open the web interface from this tab which has a few more options and info. You can access this web interface from another computer on the network to by typing your local ip address followed by :9999 (or whatever port you typed in).
   
6. After that you should be good to go, make sure your firewall isn't blocking anything on either computer. On the receiver computer, start Songbird (or restart if it's already started) and the library should appear on the left side under the name you named it. It will appear in people's iTunes on the network as well.
   

I will continue testing different nightly builds because the current one crashes songbird occassionally while playing, but that might just be the Songbird plugin. I will report back to see if I can stop the crashing.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the guide.

[.bin]

Thanks for this tutorial.

Using this method to run music at a party from my main PC to a laptop setup out the back.. Users can then edit the music files via mapped drives.