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Thread: Subsonic
Harrison 14:05 20th September 2011
Have any of you ever tried Subsonic?

http://www.subsonic.org

I've been using it for the past week and am really impressed. It is a streaming music server you install on your PC. But not to stream music from a service to your PC. Instead to stream your music library to others. Once the server is installed you access it using a web interface, with a look similar to any music library software like iTunes or Mediamonkey. You can access all server settings from it, plus navigate through and play your music. Once setup you can access the server from any systems on your network by pointing them to the PC running the server.

But more interestingly, it can serve the music over the internet, by forwarding port 80 to the PC running Subsonic, and with apps available for Android, iPhone/iPad and even Windows Phone 7, you can connect to the server anywhere you are from your mobile devices, access your music library and stream it to you.

The main site tries to get you to donate to their service to obtain a unique url to connect the server, but you can just used your own broadband IP address (a very useful reason to have a fixed IP).

You do however need to make a small donation after an initial 30 day trial to keep using the service. This in turn gives you unlimited streaming and download to any mobile, video streaming, a personal web address for yourname.subsonic.org, removes any ads from the PC server webpages, and unlocked additional premium features.

It works brilliantly too, plus it has the ability to cache and/or download/save music locally, so if you are outside of a good mobile connection (or wi-fi spot) you can still listen to your cached/downloaded music.

On Android I use the App called Subsonic Music Streamer Nice interface with good controls and layout, plus album art and i fast to navigate through your music library.
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Submeg 09:07 29th September 2011
interesting...but what would you use it for?
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Harrison 16:37 29th September 2011
To stream music anywhere you like. Locally you only have to be running the Subsonic server on a single PC. To access your music and play it on any other system you just go the IP of that PC and it loads the Subsonic interface into the browser, where you can navigate your music and play it, all through the browser, so nothing is installed or sitting on any of the client systems.

But where it comes into its own is when out. Install the Subsonic App on your smartphone and you can then connect to your same server at home and stream your own music to your phone. Removes the need for a dedicated MP3 player, or the need to copy MP3s onto your phone to listen to your music. Instead you have access to your complete music library and stream what you want to listen to directly to your phone. Works very well too. I've not used my iPod since installing it.
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Submeg 14:16 30th September 2011
But if you have a large library, you are most likely going to have a dedicated portable device. The fact that you have to have a server running 24/7 and then download the songs....it seems a step backwards?
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Harrison 17:21 30th September 2011
I consider it the other way around. If you have a dedicated portable MP3 player you only have a finite amount of space on it to store your music, so you have to keep deleting and copying more music to it. With Subsonic you don't need to worry about that as the whole music library is there to access whenever you like. You are streaming the music rather than downloading it, but it does cache the last number of songs you played on the device so you can listen to those if you go offline, which is useful.

Also in addition to streaming to mobile devices and over the web, before this I used to use Mediamonkey to stream music to other PCs in the house. Having the music library on one PC, and a copy of MediaMonkey on other PCs that could access the main database on the main PC that held the music. The negative is that a copy of MediaMonkey needed to be installed on every PC you wished to play music from. Instead now I can just go to the music PCs web address, log in and access it all through any browser and it streams where ever I like.
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Submeg 23:58 1st October 2011
Ok, how big is your music library/device? If you have a smaller device then yep, makes sense. I guess, are you ever going to listen to all those songs while away from your computer? I have rated all my music, so I can have songs that I want to have on my ipod, not just random crappy ones. That way you shouldn't run out of space!
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Harrison 22:03 2nd October 2011
I think my music collection/library is about 400GB at the moment, so pretty big. I tend to suddenly decide to listen to something so there is no.guarantee it will be on my device. Especially if it is something older like an early led zep or iron maiden album, or maybe even some who or Elvis. So for me it is great.

I also often suddenly want to listen to a specific song or artist, but can't remember who it was by or who sang it. With subsonic it has a really good search feature that is.very.fast, so really useful.
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Submeg 10:47 3rd October 2011
Originally Posted by Harrison:
I think my music collection/library is about 400GB at the moment, so pretty big.


What format is that in?!!
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Harrison 16:25 3rd October 2011
MP3.

I just checked MediaMonkey and it is showing 79,482 audio tracks, totalling 4554:33:23 hours. So that would take me about 190 days of solid playback to listen to the whole library.
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Submeg 07:47 4th October 2011
Originally Posted by Harrison:
MP3.

I just checked MediaMonkey and it is showing 79,482 audio tracks, totalling 4554:33:23 hours. So that would take me about 190 days of solid playback to listen to the whole library.
You must have a LOT of cds
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