Setting up mt-daapd with Avahi on Xubuntu and Ubuntu

I have all of my music on my media server, and it is being shared by Firefly and Avahi so I can easily listen to it on any computer with Rythmbox or iTunes. Firefly is the media server. Avahi is also called Bonjour by Apple or Zeroconf or Autodiscover. It is the service that advertises Firefly to iTunes. It also advertises printers to Mac computers.

There are some pretty good explanations on the internet how to initially set up Firefly, but most of them miss an important part at the end so the next time you reboot, iTunes can still autodiscover the shared music library. I'll briefly go over the first steps in case they disappear off the net


Avahi is probably already installed and autostarts on your Ubuntu machine
Install firefly
sudo apt-get install mt-daapd

Install ID3 tag reading package
sudo apt-get install libid3tag0

Start firefly
sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daapd start

Update startup scripts so firefly restarts
sudo update-rc.d mt-daapd defaults

Go to firefly config page (or config file) and tell it your music directory
http://localhost:3689 or sudo nano /etc/mt-daapd.conf

Restart firefly
sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daapd restart

Now we need to configure Avahi to serve Firefly correctly after reboots. For some reason it will work right after installation without this. But the next reboot it would quit working.

sudo nano /etc/avahi/services/mt-daapd.service

Paste into that file

I give up, posting code into Blogger with less than symbols is broken and a huge pain in the butt. Check the link above for the code.

Restart Avahi
# /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

That's it. You should now be able to see your shared music library on iTunes. And it should survive a reboot.