Tools of the trade: Subsonic

A large digital music library is both a blessing and a curse. Before the advent of Napster I would carefully scour AudioGalaxy looking for tracks to stuff into my Rio PMP300. There comes a point, however, when a music library becomes too big for its britches and you need to move to a client/server model.

Many services offer the ability to upload your tracks for remote listening. Lala did an excellent job of this before it was promptly purchased by Apple and killed in 2010. AudioGalaxy has also been reborn as a similar service, and even Google Music is testing the waters. The issue is that many of these services limit the number of tracks you can upload or have other silly issues (no support for FLAC, inability to stream to phones, etc). I am still hopeful that Spotify will come to the rescue, but in the meantime with a burgeoning music collection it was time for an alternative.

Enter Subsonic

When your music collection reaches 1GB+ it’s time to start running your own server. Setup with subsonic was a snap. Just download and install a simple program and you’re good to go. Subsonic handles dynamicDNS so you can access your music from a simple webpage (your-hostname.subsonic.org). Although the web client is pretty solid, there are apps for the iPhone, Android, and even Flash (eww).

Subsonic offers a couple neat features I hadn’t considered

• Transcoding and conversion of audio on the fly for slower internet connections
• The ability to easily share a track or entire album
• Search that works (even for 200K+ songs)
• Open source codebase for easy editing when things don’t work as you would like

If you’ve been thinking of ditching iTunes, Subsonic is a good place to start.