forked-daapd is a DAAP and RSP media server, with support for Linux and FreeBSD. It is a complete rewrite of mt-daapd (Firefly Media Server).
DAAP stands for Digital Audio Access Protocol, and is the protocol used by iTunes and friends to share/stream media libraries over the network.
RSP is Roku's own media sharing protocol. Roku are the makers of the SoundBridge devices. See http://www.roku.com.
forked-daapd is a working title that will eventually change in the future.
The forked-daapd git tree can be found at: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/jblache/forked-daapd.git Release tarballs can be downloaded at: http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/
forked-daapd supports iTunes clients as well as a number of devices similar to the SoundBridge.
It should be able to serve your media library to any client supporting DAAP or RSP.
A single forked-daapd instance can handle several clients concurrently, regardless of the protocol.
If you plan to use Remote with forked-daapd, read the following sections carefully.
forked-daapd can be paired with Apple's Remote application for iPod/iPhone; this is how the pairing process works:
start forked-daapd
start Remote, go to Choose Library, Add Library
prepare a text file with a filename ending with .remote; the filename doesn't matter, only the .remote ending does. This file must contain two lines: the first line is the name of your iPod/iPhone, the second is the 4-digit pairing code displayed by Remote.
If your iPod/iPhone is named "Foobar" and Remote gives you the pairing code 5387, the file content will be:
Foobar 5387
move this file somewhere in your library
At this point, you should be done with the pairing process and Remote should display the name of your forked-daapd library. You can delete the .remote file once the pairing process is done.
If Remote doesn't display the name of your forked-daapd library at this point, the pairing process failed.
This will usually be because the .remote file did not contain the correct name or pairing code. Start over the pairing process and try again.
If in doubt, enable a more verbose level of logging and check that forked-daapd receives the mDNS announcement from your iPod/iPhone when the pairing code is displayed by Remote (you can also use avahi-browse for this purpose, see below). If not, you have a network issue and mDNS doesn't work properly on your network.
If you are unsure about your iPod/iPhone's name, here's how you can check for the correct value:
The name of your iPod/iPhone is the value of the DvNm field above. In this example, the correct value is Foobar.
Watch out for fancy characters; for instance, the name of your device may include Unicode characters that aren't visually different from plain ASCII characters (like the single quote if your device name follows the default scheme of "Foo's iPhone"). If unsure, change the name of your device or capture the output in a file to extract the real, correct name.
Hit Ctrl-C to terminate avahi-browse.
Remote gets a list of output devices from the server; this list includes any and all devices on the network we know of that advertise AirTunes: AirPort Express, Apple TV, ... It also includes the local audio output, that is, the sound card on the server (even if there is no soundcard).
By default, if no output is selected when playback starts, the local output device will be used, following the principle of least surprise (ie not selecting an output device at random that can be anywhere in the house or elsewhere). forked-daapd will error out if the local output is not usable (no soundcard, bad permissions, ...).
There are two ways to select the output devices in Remote:
Be aware that the settings panel doesn't show any output device when there is only one; the one output device that is available is automatically used.
forked-daapd remembers your selection and the individual volume for each output device; selected devices will be automatically re-selected at the next server startup, provided they appear in the 5 minutes following the startup and no playback has occured yet. Again, principle of least surprise.
forked-daapd will discover the AirTunes devices available on your network. For devices that are password-protected, the device's AirTunes name and password must be given in the configuration file. See the sample configuration file for the syntax.
The audio section of the configuration file supports 2 parameters for the local audio device:
forked-daapd should support pretty much all media formats. It relies on libav (ffmpeg) to extract metadata and decode the files on the fly when the client doesn't support the format.
However, libav is not necessarily very good at extracting metadata, so some formats may cause problems. FLAC, Musepack and WMA use custom metadata extractors to work around that.
Formats are attributed a code, so any new format will need to be explicitely added. Currently supported:
Depending on the client application, you may need to optimize your MPEG4 files for streaming. Stream-optimized MPEG4 files have their metadata at the beginning of the file, whereas non-optimized files have them at the end.
Not all clients need this; if you're having trouble playing your MPEG4 files, this is the most probable cause. iTunes, in particular, doesn't handle files that aren't optimized, though FrontRow does.
Files produced by iTunes are always optimized by default. Files produced by FAAC and a lot of other encoders are not, though some encoders have an option for that.
The mp4creator tool from the mpeg4ip suite can be used to optimize MPEG4 files, with the -optimize option: $ mp4creator -optimize foo.m4a
Don't forget to make a backup copy of your file, just in case.
Note that not all tag/metadata editors know about stream optimization and will happily write the metadata back at the end of the file after you've modified them. Watch out for that.
forked-daapd supports M3U playlists. Just drop your playlist somewhere in your library with an .m3u extension and it will pick it up.
Support for iTunes Music Library XML format is available as a compile-time option. By default, metadata from our parsers is preferred over what's in the iTunes DB; use itunes_overrides = true if you prefer iTunes' metadata.
Smart playlists are not supported at the moment.
forked-daapd has /some/ support for artwork, with a number of limitations.
Embedded artwork is not supported; libav (ffmpeg) doesn't support this yet, if and when this is added to libav, forked-daapd will support it.
Your artwork must be in PNG or JPEG format, dimensions do not matter; forked-daapd scales down (never up) the artwork on-the-fly to match the constraints given by the client. Note, however, that the bigger the picture, the more time and resources it takes to perform the scaling operation.
As for the naming convention, it is quite simple; consider your foo.mp3 song, residing at /bar/foo.mp3:
For "groups" (same album name and album artist), the situation is a bit different:
You can use symlinks for the artwork files; the artwork is not scanned/indexed in any way in the database and there is no caching on forked-daapd's side.
The library is scanned in bulk mode at startup, but the server will be available even while this scan is in progress. Of course, if files have gone missing while the server was not running a request for these files will produce an error until the scan has completed and the file is no longer offered. Similarly, new files added while the server was not running won't be offered until they've been scanned.
Changes to the library are reflected in real time after the initial scan. The directories are monitored for changes and rescanned on the fly.
Symlinks are supported and dereferenced. This does interact in tricky ways with the above monitoring and rescanning, so you've been warned. Changes to symlinks themselves won't be taken into account, or not the way you'd expect.
If you use symlinks, do not move around the target of the symlink. Avoid linking files, as files themselves aren't monitored for changes individually, so changes won't be noticed unless the file happens to be in a directory that is monitored.
Bottom line: symlinks are for directories only.