iTunes on PandaBoard/Raspberry Pi or other single board computer

The primary obstacle to getting a full featured program like iTunes to work is running OS X on non Apple hardware and/or Windows on ARM.

I do run ubuntu on a Beagle Black and it is suitable for music streaming and light video streaming using open source packages. Nothing I have found works as well as an AppleTV and iTunes Match for music streaming, though. The black CPU is dual core, but severely resource constrained so it can generally walk or chew gum but not both.

I have built just such a device using a Raspberry Pi and separate DAC from Hifiberry.com (the built-in Pi soundcard is notoriously bad).

In terms of software, I'm running the Raspbian distro, along with forked-daapd which is an iTunes-compatible music server - I rsynced the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder from my Mac over to the forked-daapd folder on the Pi. I control this using the Apple Remote app from my iPhone - it even picks up the artwork. Nice setup and the DAC sounds great.

I'm also running Shairport so it can act as an Airplay receiver, too.

(As a side note, I'm trying to go one step further and have this work without any separate network infrastructure as I want to use it in my car - I've added a USB wireless adapter to the Pi and configured it to act as a wireless access point, then connected the iPhone to it directly via wifi. It's almost working perfectly, aside from this rather nuanced but important issue.)

I used XBMC on a raspberry pi using OPENELEC. You won't have a full blown iTunes but you can have a very good media center with Airplay capabilities and plenty of really cool XBMC add-ons. I totally recommend it.