Stream music directly from your iPhone or iPod touch with the FireflyMediaServer application, a ported version of the same media service that shares iTunes libraries over your wireless network. Say you're at a friend's place and you want to play a song you've been really into. Rather than handing over your earbuds, you could just log in to her wireless network and stream the song on a proper set of speakers through the iTunes shared library. Setting it up takes a little doing, but it's also very simple.

First, you should have already performed the dead simple one-click jailbreak, which will install Installer.app on your iPhone or iPod touch. Now you'll need to run Installer.app and add a new repository to your sources. Here's how that works:

Go to the Sources tab of Installer.app, tap Edit, then tap the Add button and type http://home.mike.tl/iphone as a new source. After you've added the new source and refreshed your repositories, go find FireflyMediaServer in the Install tab and install it. Once FireflyMediaServer is installed, you'll notice your iPhone or iPod touch shows up in the Shared libraries section in iTunes. The default password for the library is "dottie".

I was surprised at how well this media streaming worked from the iPhone. For example, I was successfully streaming to two different computers at once without a hiccup. Just keep in mind that you'd probably want to turn your auto-lock off while you're streaming to be certain you keep an active wireless connection while you're streaming your tunes and this will likely drain your battery rather quickly. You won't use this all the time, but what a great feature for when you do want it.

Mike Ter Louw has brilliantly managed to port mt-daapd, the Firefly Media Server, to iPhone. Firefly makes use of your iPhone's built in mDNS/Bonjour media service to stream audio to iTunes. Any iTunes. The one running on your home computer. The one running on a friend's computer. Wherever. Stream from your iPhone to a quality audio system. Here's how it works.

Navigate to http://home.mike.tl/iphone/ with Mobile Safari. This adds Mike's repository to Installer.app. Then launch Installer, select Firefly and install it. Wait as the package builds your music database. This can take 5-10 minutes based on the size of your iTunes library.

On your computer--or any computer you're visiting with--set iTunes to share music. Make sure your firewall settings allow communication and enable "Look for shared library" in your iTunes Sharing preferences.

In iTunes, locate your shared library--it will be listed by the name of your iPhone. Select it and log in. Even if you're using 1.1.1, the media password still appears to be "dottie".

Then just select a song and play! This, ahem, rocks. A lot.

Update: TUAW Reader Jonathan adds: "Safari redirects to /beta/. I bypassed that by going into installer.app's sources page and manually adding http://home.mike.tl/iphone. Installer picked it up right away, and it's building my music database now. "

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