Hi,

I'm looking to setup a home mp3/aac audio server on a Fedora box that will feed 3 wireless MacOS X Powerbooks and 1 stereo.

At this stage I think the best design might be to plug the stereo directly into audio output of the Fedora box, and install a linux mp3 player to play mp3's directly from the server to the stereo. I want to avoid having an additional monitor/keyboard/mouse setup next to the stereo so the best option is to perhaps run the Fedora box headless and use VNC from one/any of the Powerbooks to control it.

What would be nice is an mp3 player with a web interface that could be controlled directly from a browser on the Powerbook. Xmms seems to be a popular linux mp3 player but so far I haven't been able to find any players with web interfaces. Any suggestions? Recommendations for linux mp3 players?

I also want to give individual powerbooks access to the music on the server, and ability to select/play what they want. Useful if you want to sit in your room and work whilst listening to something different than is in the lounge or wherever the stereo is. I'm thinking one way of doing this would be to setup a daap:// daemon on the Fedora box which will broadcast an itunes share to the powerbooks and enable individual selections. Has anybody been successful in setting this up? I see there is a thread about it on Macosxhints.

Another consideration is the linux filesystem/network setup. Currently I'm using ext2, and connecting to the linux box via an NFS share from my powerbook. Mostly it works although I have had data loss - files going missing or being strangely relocated. It's more than likely iTunes is responsible for this flakiness but all the same - i am wary. I have read about problems with linux filesystems dealing with long filenames when sharing on cross platform networks. My current setup seems to be handling the OS X resource forks by saving them correctly as ._<name> items. I have also read that the linux filesystem is unimportant when using SAMBA shares, as SAMBA will translate between the different filesystems. It seems possible to compile Gentoo with HFS support although I'd rather not go there since I already have a Fedora system running, but will if it's a superior option. Any recommendations about how to proceed?

I think this is a question...

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warren

If selection is not a great issue maybe setting up a streaming server would be a nice solution.

Well lots of options here, but 2 big ones. For streaming, look into IceCast , I use that to stream stuff at work, works great!

If you want to be able to "pick" things off a playlist - then you are either going to need a rather advanced interface with IceCast (I don't recommend this) Or simply make the server a FILE server, and serve all the mp3s/whatever to whatever client wants to access them. And for that file share, I would recommend Samba, its fast, and OSX can talk to it easily, as can Windows, and oher linux boxes.

Does this help?....

Here's a site that might help: http://www.linux-sound.org/