Neat application for home streaming centre

[Rothchild]

If you want to build your own home streaming server this is a really neat application: http://www.subsonic.org

I've been test running it on an old laptop while I wait to take delivery of the Raspberry Pi that it will eventually serve up the digital media to the house. It's free and Open Source (with windows, linux and mac versions) but you can buy some extra features to really make it neat (additional apps / mobile access, access to a custom proxy server to ease remote access etc) FLAC streams nicely from it on the home network (when using VLC as a front end) although the 320k Ogg transcode option in the web interface works really well and sounds really pretty good too.

[Covenant]

Is it similar to Foobar Marc?

[Rothchild]

Hi Jerry,

No, I don't think so. I don't know Foobar, but from what I can tell it's a media player and ripper program. This is a full on streaming media server so you can access your central music repository anywhere (your own personal cloud, if you will).

Once you've installed it on your main machine you can log in to it across your home network and it will stream audio to that machine over http(s). EG I install it on my testbed laptop which I have my router assign 192.168.1.2 as an IP to, I can reach the web interface of the music library and player at http://192.168.1.2:4040 (4040 being the port it uses by default). If you pay the donation you can have a friendly domain, something like www.username.subsonic.org

The web interface itself doesn't support FLAC playback (hence the need to transcode, the server does this in real-time, non-destructively, to reduce the bandwidth usage) but the server will stream the file 'straight' (ie not transcoded) too if you use a compatible player (foobar may indeed do the job for this, the very latest 'bleeding edge' version of 'Clementine' has a client built in to it, Banshee and VLC also work well).

You can also use it in 'jukebox' mode which means you can control the playback of files on the main machine from any other connected device (so if you want to use your phone or pad to control playback on your main htpc you can).


EDIT: I note you have a Squeeze box, you could understand Subsonic to be a kind of open access, turbo charged, Squeeze Server that turns any internet device in to a Squeezbox.

[Covenant]

Cool!