This howto outlines the various ways to configure and use a network drive not located on the master backend for the storage of MythMusic content. The original intent was to show how to utilize the hard drive of a remote frontend for the storage of all music content. Why take up space on the master hard drive when you have lots of space on the remote frontends hard drive!

Storing Music on the Hard Drive of a remote front end: (needs work)

In this setup you will use the hard drive of your remote frontend myth box for the storage of your music content. The master system will be able to rip and play content to and from the new storage location. In order to accomplish this, you must configure and share a directory on your frontend system so that the backend will be able to write to it. Why do this? This can save space on the masters drive for video content, and utilize the space you may have available on the remote box.

1. Create/Choose a directory to contain your music on the frontend.
2. Install/Configure NFS (see NFSHowTo)
3. Start required deamons needed by NFS
4. Configure hosts file so the share can be used by clients
5. Configure MythMusic on the remote front end (via Myth/Setup/Mythmusic) to use the directory you chose earlier

1. Configure your backend system to use NFS
2. Mount the new share on backend system
3. Configure MythMusic on the backend system (via Myth/Setup/Mythmusic) to use the directory you used during the mount

Storing Music on the Hard Drive of a Linux PC: (needs work)(edited 9/19/2004 rusty0101)

1. Set up fileshareing on the remote PC - you may use nfs, samba, or other network file systems, the specifics are up to you. See the UsingSambaHowTo for a partial explanation of Samba setup for sharing. Your distribution may also have a gui interface to help you set up file or dirctory shares. I know this is true fo Mandrake and Fedora Core 2, I presume it is true for SuSE and several other distributions. Webmin can help you set up shares as well, see WebminHowTo for setting that up, then on it's 'Servers' tab see 'Samba Windows File Sharing' to set up a Samba share, or on the 'Networking' tab see 'NFS Exports' to share via NFS.
2. create a directory on mythbox to use as mount point for remote directory
3. edit /etc/fstab on Mythtv box to mount shared directory on startup. Again you can use the tools shown in the UsingSambaHowTo or even Webmin under the System tab, 'Disk and Network File Systems' utility.
4. in MythMusic setup change the path myth uses to find music to the new mount point created in step 2
5. Remember to scan for new music to import those files.

Storing Music on the Hard Drive of a Windows PC: (needs work)(edited by rusty0101 on 9/19/2004)

1. Create a folder that you will share that contains your music. You may even want to create a common share on your home 'server' for everyone in the family to put their music on. (That's up to you.)
2. Right click on the folder, and select 'Sharing'
3. Select 'Share this folder', and give it a reasonable share name. (I like 'MyMusic' for a folder of music files, 'MyPhotos' for images, 'MyMovies' for videos, etc. Your choice, preferably easy to remember.)
4. If you are not going to use your master to rip music cd's, I would cchange the permissions to 'Read' only. I leave it up to you to decide if you want to create different permissions for different users.
5. Get the name or IP address of your box, open a command prompt and type 'ipconfig /all' (for all versions of windows nt and later. Win9x/me use the command 'winipcfg' to bring up a window where you can select amoung the various network addapters to find the one that can be pinged from your mythtv system.
6. Install smbfs, with "apt-get install smbfs"
7. On your MythTV box log in as root, and use your favorite editor (nano, vi, emacs, xedit, whatever) to open your /etc/fstab fil, and add the line: //windows-server-name/shared-folder-name /linux/mount/point smbfs username=xp_username,password=xp_password 0 0
   .
8. For /linux/mount/point (for music files as an example) I use /myth/music
9. Save and exit your text editor
10. Test by excuting the command mount /linux/mount/point
    
11. Get back into the frontend software, and from the main menu go to setup then Music Settings, then General Settings. Make sure that the mount point you identified for fstab matches the 'Directory to hold music:' field. Make changes as necessary.
12. Back to the top menu go to 'Music' and at the bottom of this menu is 'Scan for New Music' which should now go through your music and index it as you would expect for the music module

You should be done. You may wish to do something like this for your photo gallary if you are a photographer. Instructions are roughly the same, though the Images module does not index the photos. (that I know of yet.)

Here's a nice procedure to stream your KnoppMyth music to iTunes using DAAP

It would appear that www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-kuleszth/debian is no longer available so here is an alternate method using mt-daapd.

1. Download the latest version of mt-daapd from Sourceforge
2. All the following steps require super user privileges. So for example execute a "su -" on a command line.
3. Run the command: dpkg --install mt-daapd_0.2.3-1_sarge_i386.deb
4. Open the mt-daapd.conf file in a text editor: vi /etc/mt-daapd.conf
5. Change the directory where your music files are stored: mp3_dir /mnt/Music
6. Optionally, change the server name (which will show up in iTunes or wherever) and refresh interval (the interval at which mt-daapd scans for changes to the directory).
7. Save your changes and close the file.
8. Start the server with: /etc/init.d/mt-daapd start
9. The server should be up an running now. The first time the server start-up can take a while, depending on the amount of music you want to share.

Here all the old instructions using daapd:

1. All the following steps require super user privileges. So for example execute a "su -" on a command line.
2. Add the line "deb http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-kuleszth/debian binary/" to the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If you also want access the source code for the packages, also add "deb-src http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-kuleszth/debian source/" to the file.
3. Update the Debian packages database by running "apt-get update".
4. Get and install the packages for the iTunes server with "apt-get install daapd"
5. In the file /etc/daapd.conf put the name of directory where you store your music in the line beginning with "Root".
6. Restart the server with "/etc/init.d/daapd restart".
7. The server should be up an running now. The first time the server start-up can take a while, depending on the amount of music you want to share.