Subsonic music streamer

[Haven]

So, like most of you. I work away from where my music collection is most of the time. Also like most of you I've paid in the past for online music services such as Spotify.

But having to pay to access a service that lets you listen to music you already have available to you at home kinda irks. For this reason I've been looking into self hosted streaming solutions that let me listen to my own music on the go.

Initially I tried Ampache, I've used it in the past (many years ago) and figured it was worth a go second time round. The sad truth is that there is precious little development in the ampache world. After spending some time woefully dealing with PHP session errors and then PHP 5.4 incompatibilities I lost the will the care about Ampache very quickly.

After a bit of googling I came across Subsonic as an alternative to Ampache. Despite being put off by the single java file I figured what the hell and installed it on my home linux server.

Installation was a joke, extract files and run subsonic.sh ... erm really ? What else ? Nothing ... really ? Its honestly the simplest app I've ever installed.

Once the app fires up you browse to the URL and port (4040) on the hosting machine. Add some users, add some music and you're most of the way there.

Last step. Install subsonic on your ipad/iphone/android(phone/tablet) and add your server details.

Playing music via my phone has so far been hitch free, the android app supports caching (YAY!) so if you play the same files a lot you don't need to re-stream them constantly.

Everything looks nice and works nice. So now I'll be able to happily listen to my music whilst at work \o/

Anyone else in the same boat, give it a look and see if it works for you as well as it did for me.

The server is free for (30 or 60 days - need to check) and then you need to "donate" to get a licence. I think they recommend 20 euros. Given what I've seen so far I've no issue with that cost for what I've gotten access to so far.

You can find more at: http://www.subsonic.org/

 

[Ronin Storm]

For the streaming over the internets, does it convert to a lower bitrate or just transmit the file as is? (Y'know, for those of us on less than infinite bandwidth )

 

[thatbloke]

Presumably you need an always-on box and a decent upload for that to work too, though :/

 

[Haven]

For the streaming over the internets, does it convert to a lower bitrate or just transmit the file as is? (Y'know, for those of us on less than infinite bandwidth )

It supports both full stream or re sampled stream. To change the bit rate it supports full transcoding on the fly for files: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/transcoding.jsp

To quote the app in its per user settings:

Max bitrate
If you have constrained bandwidth, you may set an upper limit for the bitrate of the music streams. For instance, if your original mp3 files are encoded using 256 Kbps (kilobits per second), setting max bitrate to 128 will make Subsonic automatically resample the music from 256 to 128 Kbps.

I'm most likely going to using it just as much in the house as out of the house so within the house I could have a user setup to use full stream. Out of the house I could have a user setup to use reduced stream rate.

NB Whilst the Android app is free, the Iphone app(s) cost for this one.

 

[Haven]

Presumably you need an always-on box and a decent upload for that to work too, though :/

Yes, the box needs to be on when you need to stream. Given it costs £30 for a rasberry Pi (more than up to the task and uses 3Watts of power) is this really a barrier to anyone now ?

Upload required will depend on your music files and the compression/bitrate you use. i.e. an mp3 at 256kbit will need a little over 256k upload to stream (assume 20% overhead to be on the safe side). Depending how much space you allocate to the cache on your phone app you may end up running a lot from cache and not impacting your home bandwidth at all.

 

[thatbloke]

for my net connection I have about 0.9mbps upload on a good day - not enough to be streaming music at a decent quality :/

 

[Haven]

for my net connection I have about 0.9mbps upload on a good day - not enough to be streaming music at a decent quality :/

so about 920kbit/s ... you can definitely stream over that as long as the client (player) has a decent buffer to cope with peaks and troughs.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Thanks for that.

Actually, I've realised that I can probably do all this with my SqueezeBox (now known as Logitech Media Centre) so I should look into that. I don't get a whole lot more upload than TB, though (~1.1Mbit if I want anything approaching an acceptable downstream).

 

[Panda with issues...]

What's wrong with an ipod or equivalent? It seems to present all the functionality you've described in a far more efficient way.

 

[Spicypixel]

But it's not nerdy enough.

 

[Haven]

What's wrong with an ipod or equivalent? It seems to present all the functionality you've described in a far more efficient way.

I have a central music store synced between many sources. I also want to control my own files and their access. My system is plenty efficient.

 

[Ronin Storm]

What's wrong with an ipod or equivalent?

If you want to actually copy your music onto a device, nothing.

If you simply want to play your music over the internets, everything.

The former is fine in a world of poor internet access but the latter is increasingly superior as internet access improves.

 

[Panda with issues...]

If you want to actually copy your music onto a device, nothing.

If you simply want to play your music over the internets, everything.

The former is fine in a world of poor internet access but the latter is increasingly superior as internet access improves.

I guess I'm really struggling to see how having to be permanently connected to the internet is more efficient than having to sync an MP3 player once in a while when you've downloaded more media.

I don't really see this as anything other than a similar argument to always online DRM.

Perhaps I should be looking at it more like dropbox?

The difference is, I'm only ever going to be using dropbox somewhere I'd expect to be working, whereas I expect to listen to music pretty much anywhere, including on the bus, train, car, middle of nowhere.

Really not trying to be obtuse here, just struggling to understand.

 

[Ronin Storm]

You're still thinking of this in terms of point to point, unreliable, narrow bandwidth. Now, sure, that's often the case at the moment, but there's really no need for that to be the case in perpetuity.

Imagine an environment where you can maintain a wideband wireless connection to a simple, low cost device that can play your music without the need to muck about with the antiquated concept of "syncing", where your music was just available to you where ever you went. That could be something of a reality if you lived in a city with municipal wifi.

And, indeed, why wouldn't you? The devices to receive a music stream are much lighter and simpler than an iPod and could be made at a small fraction of the price. And the service doesn't just provide for music, but documents, games, indeed anything digital at all. It's all just about having a device that can call home and having the bandwidth to support that.

Don't really see your comment about DRM. It's your stuff. You use it how you want. This way, you have it in one place and can access it from many places. No accidentally leaving it at home, or needing to remember to sync and charge your iThing.

 

[Panda with issues...]

So my point about DRM is that you have to be connected all the time to access your stuff.

I guess we'll have to see how things go with municiple wifi, I know that they're trying that with London for the olympics, but there have been discussions about how certain times of day (rush hour) etc may prove extremely difficult, and they're the times most people will want to use it.

I suppose I'm just not very optimistic at the moment about all this kind of stuff, given my experiences with a useless wireless dongle, and frequent trips to places where internet is poor.

 

[Haven]

So my point about DRM is that you have to be connected all the time to access your stuff.

This is not entirely true.

If your client supports caching (subsonic ones do) then you can set it to cache the track so you only need to stream it once. This reduces the bandwidth required for the app significantly. So on my phone I've set a 2GB cache limit and it will fill this and then drop the oldest tracks for newer ones as I add new music. You can set the cache size as big as you like.

You can also set the android client to download the entire playlist as soon as you create it - nothing stopping you doing this at home whilst you're on wifi and close to the server and then playing on the move.

NB I've not yet tried shutting off all network access and playing cached songs so no idea how it behaves under those conditions.

 

[Panda with issues...]

You can also set the android client to download the entire playlist as soon as you create it - nothing stopping you doing this at home whilst you're on wifi and close to the server and then playing on the move.

So...synching it?

 

[Haven]

So...synching it?

If you like to thing of caching as the same thing as sync'ing then I'm all for that and will happily support you in that defintion. I do this to prevent the further derail of discussion about a really cool bit of software that I think a few folks would get some good usage out of. If its not your bag or doesnt suit your purposes/desires/wants then thats just peachy.

So ... go try it. Its really really good!

Or don't and I won't hate you for it.

 

[DocBot]

for us not linux-enabled, there's always audiogalaxy, which I use, and like

 

[Haven]

for us not linux-enabled, there's always audiogalaxy, which I use, and like

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/download.jsp

It runs fine on Windows, OSX and Linux