Well, once upon a time, someone at Apple dreamed up a new version of a music player. An so [iTunes] was born. iTunes allows you to rip your music collection from your CDs, listen to broadcasts over the Internet and even share your local music with some friends who have to be on the same subnet.
Now, there's one little thing missing. Sure, your local PC or Mac can act as a server for others, as well as other machines with iTunes installed on them can act as a server for you. But what if the guy who happens to have your favorite music turns off his machine? Exactly, you'll get zilch, nada, rien, nothing or whatever your preferred word for the big void is.
Thus it would definitely be nice to have a local server, stuffed with MP3s, that could act as a central music hub for your local network. That's exactly what [daapd] does. Unfortunately, daapd is only available for Linux and there aren't (as of yet) that many Linux servers out there.
So I decided to port the thing to Windows. The task proved easier, at least for daapd itself, than I thought for all that was needed was the [CygWin] emulation layer for Windows and some tweaking of one source file. However, I couldn't get the also needed service announcer to compile under Cygwin. As it turned out, Cygwin doesn't support multicast traffic, so there's no way to get that up and running using open source tools. Luckily, a friend of mine owns Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net 2003 and for Apple not only provides the source code for free but also includes a project file that works for VS.Net 2003, compiling a native Windows version of the announcer was a breeze.
Still, the setup isn't yet perfect. I'll try to provide a startup script that will do all the parameter setting. That may or may not work, for I can't test each and every environment you may wish to run WinDaapd on.
Well, ok. So here's the current archive with the executables. No documentation included right now and the aforementioned startup script is still missing. So you're more or less on your own for the moment.
Instructions:
Unpack the contents of the archive in the root directory of a drive on the machine where your MP3 collection resides. It will create a directory named daapd with some executables and some DLLs in it. Now change to the directory where your MP3 collection is. From there, call the daapd server using
X:\daapd\daapd -v
on a command line shell. Replace the drive letter X: with the letter of the drive where you installed the daapd server. Scanning your music collection may take a while, so be patient. In the meantime, open another shell and start the Rendezvous announcer using
Rendezvous -rs "Win iTunes Jukebox" "_daap._tcp" "local." 3689 "Win iTunes Jukebox"
When starting iTunes for Mac or iTunes for Windows, the new server will show up on your list of audio ressources. Have fun.
![[Home]](/wiki.jpg)