Today was a bit of a slow day–I still cannot get Media Center 11 to run under Wine–so I thought I might give a shot to get mt-daapd to serve up files to a daap enabled client on Windows. iTunes is the obvious choice for a client but the UI sucks so bad that I want to slam my hands in a drawer and staple my eyes shut but luckily a kind soul has made a plugin for Winamp which makes me happy.
Here’s how it went down:
Server Side:
- Make sure you are running SSH and if your not ask yourself why.
- Grab mt-daapd and take care of any dependencies:
libsqlite0
libsqlite0-dev
gawk
gcc (this will install gcc-4.0)
libid3tag0-dev
libgdbm-dev
- Edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf to your liking such as mp3_dir and servername
- Grab Avahi and take care of any dependencies:
avahi-daemon
avahi-utils
libnss-mdns
- Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to ensure that mdns is on the hosts line:
hosts: files dns mdns
- Give dbus a kick: sudo invoke-rc.d dbus restart
- Get your avahi-daemon running: sudo invoke-rc.d avahi-daemon start
- Fire up mt-daapd: sudo mt-daapd
Client Side
- Get yourself a copy of iTunes, only if you are a masochist, or snag Winamp with the DAAP plugin if you love yourself.
- Install Rendezvous Proxy and configure it (you need this to fool the client into thinking that the mt-daap server is on the same subnet):
IP Address - 127.0.0.1
Port - 3689
Host Label - Your_DAAP_Server_Name_Here
Service Type - daap
- Set up a tunnel with Putty for port 3689, which is just like doing it for TightVNC.
- Fire up iTunes or Winamp and wait for it to stumble onto your DAAP shares.
Well, that’s it in a nutshell.
Cribbed from James Henstridge’s write up about Avahi on Breezy, this thread, and this one.
**Update**
If Avahi seemingly won’t start check /etc/default/avahi-daemon and make sure it reads: AVAHI_DAEMON_START=1
At the moment, I’m in the middle of another shift in my listening habits, a fairly sizable one. For years I’ve been neck deep in Electronic and Hip Hop with occasional forays into Jazz and even rarer ones into the Rock, Country, and Folk diaspora. Something about synthetic beats with warm and sticky rhythms and mechanical melodies grabbed me. I hungered for dystopian tracks that spoke of a near future urban sprawl but something has been shifting in me and I’m finding my fingers crawling out in search of something more organic, something human.
Looking over the past three months of purchases sees this trend growing:
- The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
- Katharine Whalen - Dirty Little Secret
- Jas. Mathus - Old School Hot Wings
- The Blue Van - Dear Independence
- Horses Brawl - Horses Brawl
- Thievery Corporation - Versions
- Luke Vibert - Lover’s Acid
- Luomo - Paper Tigers
- Ad Astra Per Aspera - Catapult Calypso
- John Coltrane - Fearless Leader
- Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
- Radio Citizen - Berlin Serengeti
- Paris Combo - Motifs
- Willowtree - What a Way to Go!
- The Black Neon - Arts & Crafts
- Ratatat - Classics
- Monsieur Leroc - I’m Not Young But I Need The Money
- The Contingencies - Viva Ole
- Bobby Hughes Combination - Nhu Golden Era
- Marc Mac pres. Visioneers - Dirty Old Hip Hop
- Wale Oyejide - Africa Hot! The Afrofuture Sessions
- Nomo - New Tones
- The Format - Dog Problems
- Quantic - An Announcement to Answer
- Thomas Mapfumo - Spirits To Bite Our Ears : The Singles Collection 1977-1986
Out of twenty-five albums, fifteen are unrelated to Electronic or Hip Hop and a handful that I did not highlight sort of occupy a space that isn’t quite really Electronic nor quite the organic feel of Rock or Jazz. This, so far, has seen me snap up five albums completely out of my normal element. So what’s with the shift?
Nostalgia. Well, that’s the lame ass theory I’m running with anyways. Looking back over my review for The Contingencies where I raved about a sound that leans way back but charges forward fueled by straight ahead guitar arrangements. After having snapped up that album along with Willowtree my ears felt thirsty for shorter, tighter, more aggressive arrangements. Not necessarily Punk or Thrash but sounds that left me warm all over reminiscing about practicing all weekend in the drummer’s half-heated garage, fingers stiff from the cold and swollen from pounding out song after song, never getting motivated enough to get a gig even at the local dives because really all we wanted to do was play.
Seems odd to think that after dropping out from the Daddy’s Junky Music and Sam Ash groupie scene that I would throw myself at music on the opposite spectrum but for a good eight years close to 80% of what I’ve been listening to could be classified as MPC/Pro-Tools music which is a far cry from the gritty Rock and Punk fueled Blues arrangements I cut my teeth on back in high school and my first tour of duty through college.
Recapturing lost youth on the eve of my first child? Yeah, that is the most likely answer here that and an astounding sense of ennui with what I have been listening to over the past year or so; that crushing feeling of “meh” has been heavy as of late and these last couple of selections have gotten me feeling a little more fired up about music. If anything, my restless tastes result in a wide and varied selection and I can hope that our daughter, as she gets older, might find herself pawing through it on late nights like I did as a kid with my parents collection.
A better part of last week was spent teasing apart the disgusting knots that I had been letting pass as tagging among my files. The very same knots that made Jinzora damn near unusable and made Amarok look like a dollar store threw up all over MySQL. It took about 24 man hours but I tackled the genre issue along with the problem of null artists and albums, however there still appears to be some lingering issues as Amarok is reporting dead or unplayable tracks. Permissions maybe?
I’m coming to the conclusion that huge collections can be a real nightmare if tagging and preventive maintenance is not addressed up front. Having left mine to evolve over some seven years I am now really paying the price as I try and get it into a functional whole. Thankfully, there are some solid tools out there as I am leveraging Amarok with a MySQL backend for reporting (N to the E dropping in on the R and D), EasyTag, and Picard (Amarok has it baked in but it is nice to have discrete tools).
To get started I imported everything into amarok and then wrote a group of reports looking for malformed tags, particularly ones using reserved characters like “;” which would cause Jinzora to choke. Combing through the report for the obvious issues like null genre I used the sort and mass edit feature of Amarok to fill them in which made for smooth sailing. Tracks that were an absolute disaster I fixed either with EasyTag or Picard, though I found the later to offer up some less than desirable data due to taggers as lazy as I posting to Music Brainz.
At the moment I feel like I am about 80% finished, more than enough to listen to my collection the way that I like but with still enough bugs to get me hot under the collar. The bonus with a cleaner collection is now we can play music off the server for our greyhound which means I can track his listening over at Last.fm. Yes, I am that much of a dork. 
For all intents and purposes my cheap-ass home stereo solution has been working out real well but there is one minor problem and it is a problem that many of my friends have laughed at me for or just shook their heads in disgust muttering, “Have you no shame? None!?” My tags are a total mess. Worse than having non-existent, bizarre combinations like “CountryFusionSpaceJazzBop”. No, I have bleed-over where song titles end up in track numbering and genres become a string of unsupported characters. It is sickening to look at especially since it renders Jinzora damn close to useless for the way I listen to music (smartlists on random).
Here are some highlights from the genre tag:
- ■Hip-Hop
- “Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp min
- 0.03
- 03_Chaconne con variazioni.mp3
- 4
- false
- Nameless (Radio App..”
- true
To give you an indication of how big the problem is there are 6446 tracks tagged with either “-” or are empty in the genre field and on top of that I have some 33049 tracks to check. An egregious case of WTF if there every was one. So now I need to figure out how to remedy this problem and wishing that I were more diligent about my tagging like some of my friends isn’t going to get me very far.
What I need is stupid simple, easy, and relatively accurate system as I have neither the time nor the patience to hand tag every single track. So to get my feet wet, I’m going to narrow the directories down to smaller groups and give the auto-tagging feature of EasyTag a shot and see how that works. In the past EasyTag has served me well but I’ve only used it in small isolated instances and am not sure how it will handle chewing on hundreds if not thousands or tracks at a time. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work.
Working on some mixes for a friend and I am feeling pretty good about this one, especially since it is likely the first time Hip-Hope has hung out with Folk, Cambodian Psychedelia, Reggae and House.
October Sun
- “Remind Me” Royksopp Melody A.M.
- “Nostrand” Ratatat Classics
- “The Truth” The Black Neon Arts & Crafts
- “Mass” Hawke (Gavin Hardkiss) Heatstroke
- “Morse” Nightmares On Wax Carboot Soul
- “When Fortune Smiles” Kitty Craft Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch
- “Replay feat. Voice” Marc Mac pres. Visioneers Dirty Old Hip Hop
- “Mausam” Nitin Sawhney Philtre
- “Escape From Dragon House” Dengue Fever Escape From Dragon House
- “Furious Bed” Nervous Cabaret Nervous Cabaret
- “Up In The Clouds” The Contingencies Viva Ole
- “I Got Into The Car With Them” Higher Burning Fire In Plain Song
- “Planes Circle Do” Seely Winter Birds
- “Lady Pilot” Neko Case Blacklisted
- “A Ribbon” Devendra Banhart Nino Rojo
- “New Civilization” Burning Spear Creation Rebel: The Original Classic Recordings From Studio One
- “For The Love Of You” John Holt Blood And Fire Darker Than Blue: Soul From Jamdown 1973-1980
- “Chiminea” DJ Koze Kosi Comes Around
Mix making is so relaxing as well as being an incredible procrastination device.
Now that ugly episode between myself and Jinzora is in the past our relationship is blossoming and more importantly my cheap ass self has a viable home stereo solution. Cobbled from and old laptop and a set of free PC speakers given to me some 3 years ago by eMusic it is prominently (Management might say embarrassingly) featured in our living room atop our equally cheap ass 27″ Sony Trinitron (bought for 50 bucks from Prudential Healthcare when they closed their Roseland, NJ offices). Call me Sanford because I hate to see things go to waste.
Anyways, here’s a shot of set up:
The laptop is a Sony PCG-SR33 that we bought back in 2001 which never was much of a workhorse having only 128MB of RAM, a 600 MHz Celeron, and Windows ME (BLECH!). Wireless was always spotty as the unit heats up to the point where you could make a batch of fajitas on it. In this reincarnation, I’m running Ubuntu 6.06 with all non-essential services turned off and for networking I’m using a 3COM network card hooked into a Linksys WET54GS5.
The speakers are a set of Logitech Soundman X2s which do a capable job and provide a surprising bit of thump (the subwoofer is behind the TV). Target PC only gave them a 5.0 but I disagree and would rate them in the 8.5 range as they sound nice and provide quite a bit of volume. But hey, they were free!
On the software front, I tried using Rhythmbox and Amarok plus SSHFS but found that the Linksys unit could not handle the traffic and had a tendency to crash. Amarok refused to playback, deciding to eat up all available memory resulting in the laptop locking up. This is not to mention that the combination of those two packages plus SSHFS would cause the Sony to run so hot we had to turn on the AC and make some fresh iced tea. Switching to Jinzora plus Beep Media Player turned out to be the right combination, particularly now that Last.fm support is working. Firefox and Beep have relatively small resource footprints so the laptop runs cooler and when the switch hiccups it is not a complete and utter disaster.
So there you have it, my home stereo solution without dropping a dime on parts. Here’s a run down of the current Jinzora stats, a little low as I am rebuilding my collection so it is about 50GB short at the moment:
- Artists: 1654
- Albums: 1859
- Tracks: 21845
- Size: 124.32 GB
