Music Discussions

I had been looking for a way to stream my music to my phone or laptop for a while now and was considering signing up for a music locker service. However, a couple of months ago, a friend of mine suggested I look into Subsonic.

Subsonic is a free / open source server licensed under the GPL. There are installers for every major OS (Windows, Mac, and Linux). And the default client is web based. These three features guarantee that almost everyone will be able to make use of this software. Installation is exceedingly quick and – after downloading and running the installer – it only took me about five minutes to configure using the easy to navigate menus.

Besides the web-based front-end, there are several other methods for using Subsonic; these are mainly through 3rd party solutions. There is a desktop application written in Air, so it can be used on numerous platforms. Apps for Windows phones, iPhones and iPads, and Android devices mean that users can stream music to almost any smart phone or tablet. Also, a Windows gadget allows users to have a small app in their sidebar for controlling their music; unfortunately, there is currently no gadget for Google’s sidebar. However, the API is extremely simple to understand so anyone with even a little programming background can write a gadget for Google, or an app for any other platform. Subsonic also supports SHOUTcast allowing any program that can access a SHOUTcast stream (such as Amarok or iTunes) can play music from it without even needing a plug-in.

To use any of the alternative front-ends, the server must be licensed (although there is a 30 day trial period). Licensing requires a minimum donation of €10 or about $14.55US when I registered my server. Besides the ability to use interfaces other than the web-based one, licensing also gives you a DNS entry for your computer’s IP address. A DNS record is what converts a name like google.com to a number like 74.125.225.20. Without this, you would have to remember the number for your computer. I already had an account at DynDNS though (which has more features than just having a DNS record), so I did not make use of this service.

Since the software runs on your own computer, there is no recurring monthly fee for storage or useage as there are for most services, so this cost is not really an issue as many services charge this much each month. Also, since this is a self-hosted service, you have complete control over it. You can add users and setup different permissions for each user. For instance maybe you want certain users to be able to upload new music, but others to not have this access. Or maybe certain users are not trusted to rate music as they have poor taste. 🙂

Many features ensure that playing your music in any environment is simple. For example, besides the list of artists, there is a search box that can be used to quickly locate and artist, album, of track. Playlists are supported for when you do not have time to go through your entire library and just want to play something now – or for when you are driving and it is unsafe to look for something to play next. Subsonic can be set to use a certain amount of space for caching which works great to ensure that even over spotty connections, you will not experience skips; in fact, multiple tracks can be cached so that the next track is already loaded before the current one finishes.

In addition to caching, there is another feature of Subsonic that helps with streaming to devices with low bandwidth or unstable connections. Subsonic can be set to change a track’s format and quality on the fly (which also allows it to support a wider variety of devices). For instance, if all of your music is stored locally in the FLAC format, but your phone does not support FLAC or your bandwidth is not high enough to stream your music reliably, you could set Subsonic to dynamically convert your music to 128kbps MP3 format before streaming.

For those who are security-conscious, as we all should be, Subsonic supports HTTPS connections. What this means is that your password and music will be encrypted as it is sent between your device and server. This way, no one can login as you and change your settings or – even worse if you use the same password to log in to many other services – obtain your bank account information.

With all of these features and no monthly cost, Subsonic is a great, low-priced way to stream music. I have been using it since May and have not had any issues with it. I would highly recommend increasing the cache up from the default setting though, especially if you are frequently going to be playing music on your phone.