I’ve been looking for a solution to make my music portable. I’m slowly converting all my CD’s to mp3/flac to have them available in digital format. However, I find there aren’t many choices when it comes to media servers out there. Most web based players have one inherent problem. Everyone has a specific preference when it comes to music player (either because of ease of use or user interface or preferences it offers) and hence the web-based players need to replicate that functionality. This makes no sense since the players are already there. All you need to do is provide a protocol for the players to access that music.

Looking out for pure media servers, I found Firefly Media Server. Compared to some others I tested, I found Firefly very easy to install and configure. It is very basic in what it offers and that probably its beauty. Since most of the complicated stuff should be left to the player itself, all it needs to do is serve the music is a reliable way. Using DAAP protocol, I can connect using a variety of players to access my music. Players could be desktop based or web-based and gives you plenty of options. There is even a DAAP client for the iphone (though not very good).

I currently use Songbird with Sonbird DAAP Plugin to access all my music. I’ve also set up a server side frontend to the server so I can access my music when I don’t have my client of choice with me. I’m very pleased with how this has turned out. My main concern with the setup is DAAP isn’t a widely used protocol. So for example, I can’t use it to stream music directly from the receiver. Also, there aren’t other hardware devices that can do this either (Roku probably is one that supports this).

Overall, Firefly media server get an enthusiastic thumbs up.