Rubbish YDL How-To 1: Streaming MP3s From A Mac

Since I’m find­ing it very dif­fi­cult to keep Linux com­mands in my head, and basic Linux infor­ma­tion seems to be damn near impos­si­ble to come by with­out end­lessly click­ing through unsearch­able mail­ing list archives, I thought I’d start writ­ing up things that have taken me a while to work out here, under the snappy series title ‘Rubbish YDL How-To’s.’

This is mainly for my ben­e­fit, but since I know absolutely noth­ing about using Linux, they might be help­ful for people in the same boat. Folk who do know some­thing of Linux, feel free to point, laugh or sug­gest alter­na­tive methods.

Anyway, before I installed YDL, my old iBook was mainly used to down­load files with P2P appli­ca­tions and play MP3s over the WLAN in my house, from the new iBook and the exter­nal drive plugged into it, so these are the things I’m keen to get up and run­ning as soon as possible.

First of all, here’s how I’m stream­ing MP3s over the net­work. What fol­lows will doubt­less be heresy to expe­ri­enced Linux users, but it works. (Read­ing forums and mail­ing lists I am begin­ning to sus­pect that any­thing one Linux user does is con­sid­ered heresy by all other Linux users, and vice versa).

The fol­low­ing assumes you’re have one Mac run­ning YDL 3.0 and another run­ning OS 10.3.4, though they may well work with other ver­sions of the two oper­at­ing systems.

First of all, you need to get the YDL com­puter and the OS X com­puter talk­ing to each other. There’s lots of ways to do this, but the only one I had any luck with was using Samba which is installed by default with YDL. (And, just to con­fuse mat­ters, is meant for con­nect­ing Linux com­put­ers to Win­dows computers.)

Here’s how to set up Samba so your YDL com­puter can use files on your OS X computer:

1. On the OS X com­puter, open System Pref­er­ences > Shar­ing and check the box next to Win­dows Sharing.

2. On the YDL com­puter, first you need to make a direc­tory where you can mount your OSX com­puter as if it were a CD or drive. Since there’s a mount direc­tory already there, it seems rea­son­able to put it in there. Open up a ter­mi­nal and type:

   mkdir /mnt/ibook

3. Next, you need to get your mount on. Turn back to the OS X com­puter, and at the bottom of the Shar­ing Pref­er­ence Pane, it’ll say some­thing like this:

   Win­dows users can access your com­puter at \192.168.1.2\yourusername

   Take a note of that, and turn back to the YDL computer.

4. On the YDL com­puter, in a ter­mi­nal, type the fol­low­ing (all on one line):

   smbmount //192.168.1.2/username /mnt/ibook -o workgroup=WORKGROUP,username=yourusername

   As you can see, that’s the smb­mount com­mand fol­lowed by the address given in the Shar­ing Pref­er­ence Pane, fol­lowed by the direc­tory you made in step 2. The last bit tells Samba what work­group you want to join - wit­tily called ‘WORKGROUP’ by default on OS X - and your user­name on the OS X computer.

5. After you type the smb­mount com­mand above, some infor­ma­tion about the OS X com­puter will appear on screen, fol­lowed by a pass­word prompt. You want the pass­word asso­ci­ated with ‘yourusername.’

6. Now, if you didn’t get any error mes­sages, you’ll be able to nav­i­gate into the /mnt/ibook/ direc­tory you made before, and inside will be every­thing found in your Home direc­tory on OS X. I’m guess­ing that if you’ve both­ered to read this far you’ll know how to do that. If not, to see a list of every­thing in your newly-​mounted Home direc­tory, all ready to be used by the YDL com­puter, you could type some­thing like:

   cd /mnt/ibook

   ls

With your Home direc­tory mounted, you can now hap­pily add MP3 files from your Music folder to what­ever MP3 player you’re using on YDL. I’m using some­thing called XMMS, which isn’t exactly iTunes, but does the job.

If you keep your MP3s on an exter­nal hard drive, there’s another step to make them avail­able to the YDL com­puter. (Never having heard of sym­links, this is the bit that took me a while to figure out.)

1. On the OS X com­puter, open Ter­mi­nal, cd to the Desk­top and type some­thing like this (again, all on one line):

   ln -s /Volumes/ExternalDrive/MusicFolder/ FakeMusicFolder

   The ln -s bit tells the com­puter to make a Sym­link, which is the same as an Alias but works with all sorts of com­put­ers, not just Macs. The next bit is the folder on your exter­nal hard drive you want to make a link to, and the last bit is the name you want to give your Symlink.

2. That’s it really. Have a look inside /mnt/ibook/Desktop/FakeMusicFolder, or what­ever you chose to call the Sym­link, and you should see all your MP3s wait­ing and ready to be played over the network.

Other options I’m look­ing into: using web-​based stream­ing apps like Netjuke or Androm­eda (which would main­tain the playlists I have in iTunes) and get­ting Appletalk run­ning. Yes, Appletalk.

Next up: installing Bit­tor­rent. I’m find­ing it increas­ingly ridicu­lous that when using Linux I can work out how to stream MP3s over a net­work with rel­a­tively little trou­ble, but haven’t yet man­aged to install the one appli­ca­tion I really need!

Posted at 8pm on 03/08/04 by Jack Mottram to the linux, mac category.
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