You should still keep in mind that Banshee does not have a DAAP server of its own. Its DAAP plugin can only consume shared music. One thing that may have been added since 1.4, though I’m not sure on this, is the possibility to connect to remote DAAP servers. Go to ‘Media->Add Remote DAAP Server’, enter the domain name or the IP address of the server, make sure the server port is correct, and press OK.

DAAP servers on your local network should be detected automatically. How do you set up such a server? In my post from 2008 I recommended Tangerine. However, apart from a fix to the menu shortcut in January this year, there has been no active development on it since August 2009. The project seems pretty dead.

However, the only other DAAP server I can find in the Software Centre on the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha release, is ‘mt-daapd’. Its description says it is part of the Firefly Media Server, but according to Wikipedia the latest release of that project comes from 2008. The website mentioned in the description does no longer exist.

What alternative do we have? It seems that we have none but to stick with Tangerine. On my system it worked, and I am running the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha, so new software versions don’t seem to have broken things.

Setting Tangerine up

My Tangerine settings

First install the ‘tangerine‘ package, either by searching for it in the Software Centre, or by looking the package up in Synaptic. Tangerine will automatically start when you log in, all you need to do is configure it properly. Launch ‘Tangerine Media Sharing’, either by searching for it in Unity’s Applications place, or from—if you’re using GNOME 2.x—’System->Preferences->Tangerine Media Sharing’, and set it up to take its songs from Banshee. You might want to compare your settings to mine on the right. The Tangerine service starts right away when you enable music sharing in the settings.

Banshee’s DAAP extension is enabled by default, so it should show up automatically as soon as Tangerine is started. However, it seems that currently it crashes/freezes when Tangerine is started while Banshee is running. Restart Banshee and everything will be fine. I have been able to share my music without any problems.

(Note: it seems that for now the MPRIS extension is causing problems for Banshee in Ubuntu 11.04 alpha. When playback won’t start, disable that extension, restart Banshee—since it will have frozen—and try again. This will break Sound Menu integration, though.)

But after a while I did miss the functionality and searched in the menus of Banshee for it’s configuration dialog. I couldn’t find a thing, so I checked the preferences window. DAAP was indeed enabled, so that couldn’t be the problem. I searched at Google but couldn’t find an up-to-date guide.

Fortunately it turned out to be very easy to fix. I just disabled and enabled the DAAP plugin and there the network share was! I could start importing the music from it with an option in the context menu, Banshee automatically looked for duplicates.

Now all I wanted was the ability to share my own music too. It turned out that the DAAP server ability was removed from Banshee and you now have to use another application to handle that. Tangerine was recommened on the maillist were they discussed the removal of the DAAP server ability from Banshee, so I tried it.

Install Tangerine

Tangerine has three different ways of selecting the music it should share: automatic detection, a specified music player and a manually selected directory. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to have your music player running to share your music, although some would see that as a disadventage because you can’t easily turn it off; you’ll have to disable it in the preferences menu.

The share doesn’t show up in Banshee’s Shared Music tab. I like it, but I’m not sure if it’s a nice feature or caused by one of the bugs mentioned in the many bug reports about Banshee’s DAAP plugin I found on GNOME’s Bugzilla. I’m at least responsible for one, I reported the problem of having to reenable the plugin before it works: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=561059