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Although I’m new to the forums, I’ve been using mt-daapd for years now, and the feature set has seemed to change from duplicating what iTunes did at the time, to transcoding unsupported files and creating a web-based management interface, to talk now of integrating a flash-based player into the web interface to allow you to listen to your music anywhere.
This feature request is moving in another direction — with local playback.
After perusing through the apparent handshaking that’s taking place with dacp, I initially thought a LAMP server with syscalls to mplayer could totally handle what you need. The trick would be building and managing the library — the actual controls are pretty trivial.
But, you know, after realizing that, I’m looking at mt-daapd, with a nice, organized way of making calls to the library. Adding the ctrl-int stuff would only be a matter of implementing extra functions. Although mt-daapd wasn’t conceived or ever designed to do local playback, it really wouldn’t be as hard as you think.
Granted, it would be a lot easier to implement *dacp-like* controls initially. And maybe use some PHP scripts to control it through a Web-based interface.
And last I checked, iPhones have no problems browsing Web sites.
And a web-based interface would allow all of us kids without iPhones to get motivated enough to support the protocol (so we could use it, too)
I could picture tossing the server in the living room hooked up to the stereo, and using a WiFi-enabled PDA or a tablet PC or something to control it.
However, I have to say, although this wouldn’t be difficult to do, there *are* other projects out there that are doing, basically, what you’re requesting — to control your computer’s playback.
I haven’t used Ampache for a while, but last I knew, it had a local-playback option, using (at the time) mpeg123.
Of course, this isn’t really what you want — you want to control your library using your iPhone’s nifty program to do such. You may have to settle on a web-based control until the protocol matures enough for there to be other (non-iPhone) clients that can use it.
beside controlling the playback via the remote application, another issue have to be considered. Why is a PC needed to play back music from a NAS? Can’t the NAS stream directly to an Airport Express, controlled by a web interface?
Very interested in this feature also…
I’d love to see this feature as well.
Would love to see this functionality especially if it allowed direct streaming from NAS to an airport express without the need for a PC running… That would be fantastic
Same here. Could be so cool to stream from firefly to airport without a desk- or laptop turned on.
This is really a killer feature.
It’s been quite some time since i’ve checked this thread – for some reason the forum gave up on notifying me of any replies!
In my original post i neglected to mention that for me the playback would indeed be via an Apple AirPort Express, so there is no need to consider enabling “local playback” as previously mentioned in this thread. That said, I can imagine that there would be some work required to enable FireFly to recognise the Apple AirPort Express on the network and stream to it, as iTunes is currently able to.
~Simo
What’s the update on this. Any news?
I did a little research on this topic, because I am considering something similar for my own music streaming needs. This would be a very very cool setup, indeed.
It will be quite an undertaking. You need a DACP server to handle the conversation with Remote. To the best of my understanding, there is not currently an open DACP server, although there should be enough information out there to write one. There is an open client [1], and the pairing protocol between client and server has been broken [2].
Then you need an RAOP [3] server to stream the music to the Airport Express. Fortunately, there is a free RAOP player out there, raop-play [4].
Architecturally, these components should not be included in a DAAP server (like Firefly). Instead, they should be separate so that the DACP controller / RAOP player could communicate with ANY DAAP server, including an iTunes machine, via DAAP. That said, it would be nifty to have a package which included all these components in one handy place for users.
[1] DACP client: http://dacp.jsharkey.org/
[2] DACP pairing: http://jinxidoru.blogspot.com/2009/06/itunes-remote-pairing-code.html
[3] RAOP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAOP
[4] RAOP player: http://raop-play.sourceforge.net/Adding some of my own research results to the excellent findings allready posted by Ace.
1) The stereo guys do have a DACP server implementation
http://code.google.com/p/stereo/
They actualy use the iphone remote app as their reference client though still with a jailbreaked phone (since the pairing wasn’t figured out at the time..which is now..see Ace’s link [2])2) For using an airport express a number of RAOP implementation are out there (though still hard to find)
– Pulseaudio has RAOP output (which would be a good independent and flexible way if someone wants to implement a full solution)
– VLC speaks RAOP though hardly anyone ever heard about that one 😉
– there is a ruby based implementation which is working fine and great for rapid prototyping somethingSo basicaly every needed component is there. It is just about to get this together and nicely package it. Agree that this is not to go into firefly but rather a good extension to it kept in a seperate package.
In the mean time I’ve created a “similar” setup using mpd with the iphone mpod app on my NAS. Almost but not quite the real iThing.. (google “mpod raop mpd” and follow first result if you like more info)
I’m lacking some to really get this all together in a useable form. But if some is keen addressing this I’m willing to help.
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