DWG | Subsonic Is Awesome [Review]
So, I've been using Subsonic for a little over a week now, so I think I have a good 'first impression' and have given it enough time to get past initial ooh's and ahh's.
Subsonic is a streaming music server. The basic idea is kinda similar to Firefly Media Server (aka mt-daapd), but there are some pretty significant differences. For one, Firefly is focused on providing a DAAP share implementation, and it does a very good job of that. Subsonic, on the other hand, streams over HTTP. It also offers highly customizable, on-the-fly transcoding. It gives you a snappy web interface, not just for administrative purposes, but also for in-browser listening, as well as playlist management. It'll even download and manage podcasts for you. And the icing on the cake is it has an excellent Android app, as well as two iPhone/iTouch apps that I haven't used because I don't have an iPhone/iTouch, which are all powered by a devilishly simple REST API. (They're asking for a 10 GBP donation for the REST API feature, though you get 30 days for free - to get you hooked, much like any good crack dealer)
My home server, HomeOne, is not a workhorse by any means. In fact, it's rather antiquated. HomeOne is currently running an Athlon XP 2200+ (Thoroughbred-B core), and sports a whopping 768MB of RAM. The music drive is 300GB, and houses around 212GB of music across approximately 40,000 tracks. Subsonic is using 169MB of RAM (resident set) and barely causes the load average to spike with 3 or 4 users streaming at once.
Setting up Subsonic is beyond simple. For Debian/Ubuntu, you just download the .deb, and install with dpkg like so:
dpkg -i subsonic-4.1.deb
This sets up Subsonic, which listens on HTTP port 4040, which you can access via your browser. If you want most common transcoders to also work, you'll then execute the following:
apt-get install lame flac faad vorbis-tools ffmpeg
Depending on how much music you have, you may want to edit /etc/defaults/subsonic. I had to increase the Java memory heap to 128MB of RAM for reliable operation with my collection. You may not need to.
At this point, you would log in via HTTP and change the admin password. At that point, the only other setting that absolutely NEEDS to be touched, is to select the folder your music is stored in. It defaults to /var/music. I keep mine in /srv/music. I set the directory, and hit save. Much to my surprise, all of the music was available to be played immediately! I was surprised. It takes WinAMP, Songbird, Foobar, et all upwards of 15 minutes to go through my entire collection on my far more up-to-date desktop and file it into their libraries. (The magic here is that Subsonic just goes by your directory structure, and then once per day updates its search index. By default, the search index is updated at 3am, but there is a setting there)
You can also set your playlist folder (by default, /var/playlists, which I kept. I did have to create it manually, though.)
At this point, you're ready to go.
However, there are other useful options which can be set. For instance, you can set a maximum bitrate that certain players are not to exceed. If a file is played that exceeds that bitrate, it is downsampled with lame (or something else if you prefer; the downsample command is easily customized). This can be useful for phone app-based players if you are worried about exceeding data use limits. If you like, it can also automatically download cover art, though at the time of this writing, there is a problem with the Discogs API key which makes that feature not work.
At this point, the search for a music collection manager is over. I'm not real happy with the subAir desktop app (though it works), and the web interface can be finnicky on Linux (Adobe's Linux Flash Player's fault, not Subsonic's, though), so I'm writing my own plugin-based player that will include the ability to interface with Subsonic. But more details on that later.
Final verdict: It needs a little polish, mainly with the broken Discogs API key, but it's probably the most stable piece of Java software I've ever used. It performs admirably well on extremely low end hardware, and outdoes pretty much every other media player out there.
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Reply #1 on : Wed December 21, 2011, 00:17:32