This is one of the main reasons why I have ordered one. There are two ways that I plan to do this. I am going to create a samba share of my iTunes media folder and set itunes on my laptop to access this. I also plan to use daapd-forked if it works on ARM to act as a DAAP server so I can stream my music to my iPhone, iPad, etc without itunes having to be opened.
Thanks for the response! I'd only ever heard of FileZilla, but I'll look into Samba Share that you mentioned. I like the idea of the DAAP server, too, so I might try that with my iPod Touch after I've set up iTunes first.
I would like to use FTP but not sure how secure it would be to stream over the Internet. My perfect world solution would have been to run iTunes under WINE on the raspberry pi (server) so I could use Home Sharing to copy music to families (clients) laptops. However due to this not being possible (ARM Architecture on server), the way of copying music about will (hopefully) be as follows:
1) Set up another account on the server and give it read only access to the music share on samba settings
2) Map the read only share as a network drive in windows
3) Use songbird to index the share on the clients laptops (tested on two windows pcs (one wireless g (replacing next week and will have n) and one wireless n and only took 10 mins for the initial index of 17000 songs) The reason why I couldn't use iTunes for this bit as iTunes doesn't watch the folders so when I add music to the server, the clients libraries wouldn't update.
4) Use a songbird add on called folder sync and set up a playlist called "Add to my iTunes" and set its sync destination to the Automatically add to iTunes folder that iTunes creates.
The aim of this is that searching songbirds database is much faster than searching the server and songbird can organise by title, album, etc so it's just easier to find stuff.
I will still have the DAAP-forked as well so it can stream directly to devices but the above method would be so you could copy music to your computer, and then your iPod, for when you didn't have access to your network.
Explained a lot but it may help someone.
Ryan
Just an addition, the DAAP server does show up in itunes but doesnt have the transfer to itunes bit like iTunes Home Sharing has.
Message was edited by: Ryan Kilburn
You can install MPD (music player daemon) on Raspbian. From the configuration file, you can enable an HTTPD stream as a type of audio output. Then you can just navigate to "http://YOURPUBLICIP:YOURPORT" in a browser or internet radio player to stream. Controls can be through any MPD client on any computer, Android device, etc. I usually SSH into a screen session running ncmpcpp to control, but MPDroid is a pretty good graphical client for Android. Furthermore, this service can be secured with a password easily. You just need to set a password directive in the MPD configuration file. That way, you will need a password to unlike the controls and/or the audio stream. You can also easily change the quality/bit-rate of the stream so that it's tailored perfectly to your connection. If you're streaming over the internet, the bitrate would have to be lower. However, if you're just streaming locally, you can set it up nice and high.
