Issues with OS X 10.5 iTunes 8.1.1 and mt-daapd (aka Firefly Media Server)

I’ve recently upgraded my iTunes installation on my MacBookPro to 8.1.1 and to my horror found that I’m no longer able to connect to my DAAP library on my NAS.

This is rather strange as the issue has only just appeared in 8.1.1 and does not appear on my windows machines which reside on a different network, and have Bonjour / Rendezvous mDNS traffic broadcast locally by RendevousProxy. After much annoyance, I decided to do a quick check of what an older iTunes library was sending out, and comparing that to Avahi. It turns out that my Avahi configuration was missing some vital Text Records. This wasn’t an issue in previous revisions of the iTunes client, but appears to be an issue in 8.1.1.

I updated my daap.service file in /etc/avahi/services/ to the following

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
  <service>
      <type>_daap._tcp</type>
          <port>3689</port>
	  <txt-record>txtvers=1</txt-record>
	  <txt-record>iTSh Version=131073</txt-record>
	  <txt-record>Version=196610</txt-record>  </service>
</service-group>