Sharing all your music with Firefly Media Server

I have a cross-platform household. My wife and daughter use Windows, I use Windows for work and Ubuntu for meaningful things ;). I have a lot of music and audiobooks, mostly in mp3 format, but a few things in ogg, flac, and mp4. Everyone likes to listen to something, but how to share all the files? There are many solutions, of course, but the most convenient one for me was the one which allowed my wife to easily access the music with iTunes. The solution was the Firefly Media Server. Installing this under Ubuntu could hardly be simpler. From a command line, as root, type:

apt-get install mt-daapd ffmpeg

This will get you the software you need. After the packages are installed, edit the /etc/mt-daapd.conf file and change the location of your media files to wherever you keep them. After saving the file, issue

/etc/init.d/mt-daapd restart

I have occasionally found cases where Ubuntu starts services immediately after installing them. Restart means it will stop the process first, if there is an active one.

Wait a couple of minutes, for Firefly to scan your media files, and they should be accessible via DAAP. iTunes will discover the new server automatically, if the computer is on the same subnet as the server. I am told that Songbird works well with Firefly as well.