- Why are you using MySQL instead of SQLite or something even simpler? Surely my personal music streamer doesn't need serious scalability.
- Why does the setup require futzing with my Apache configs to use mod_rewrite? For just streaming music, I'm willing to put up with ugly ("something.php/directory") URLs. This would also make it easier to get up and running with non-Apache web servers (lighttpd, for instance).
- Do I really need to use a non-default PHP configuration? And increasing the interpreter's memory limit seems a little ominous.
This is all to say that perhaps the right way to deploy something like this would be as a single program you can run that has its own built-in Web server. As it is, the configuration is daunting for a home computer (although completely reasonable for a real server setting).
2. the mod rewrite is part of the framework I'm using (Symfony 1.4). just makes things a little easier to secure and the code a bit more maintainable. Luckily you only have to do it once. There is a VM version that uses vmware and it works fairly well if you don't feel like doing a bunch of setup - just iTunes won't play nice with the VM edition because of static paths :/
3. the problem I found is that if you have a large library, the itunes xml can take a lot of ram to parse. If you're not using itunes, the RAM demands might be a bit lower.
I do hear you on the setup complexity. I think when I get closer to a perfectly stable program with developers familiar with buidling system specific installers, I'd like to build a slick installer that installs and spins up a server for you. For now there's the VMware image.
At the risk of sounding too stuck up, Ruby and Python have many frameworks for running themselves as web servers.
