I have a Mac Mini that sits in my lounge and is hooked up to my LCD TV and hifi. I use it with front row to watch “stuff” and listen to music. I’ve been wanting to work out a way to access all the music on my other Linux machine for a while now.

Originally I thought about sharing the music on the Linux machine using Samba and mounting that on the Mac Mini. Then thankfully I remembered about iTunes ability to play from special iTunes shares. A little bit of searching online and I found mt-daapd and this howto.

Took me about 5 minutes to get everything configured and working… I can now listen to all my music from the comfort of my couch.

To install it all I had to do was ensure that the libid3tag0 package was installed (it was) then downloaded the latest stable release from Source Forge and installed that, tweaked a config file and restarted the service.

Only problem I’ve got at the moment is that I have to first connect to the share from iTunes before it’ll work in Front Row. If you try connect direct from Front Row it says you have to use iTunes because the share needs a password, which is strange because the share has no password and iTunes never asks for one.