Stream your music library anywhere with Subsonic

I’ve stopped carrying my old 80gb iPod classic ever since I got my new phone (HTC Hero on Sprint). Between Pandora, Slacker Radio, podcasts on Google Listen, and the 8gb MicroSD I installed, I was never really hurting for music, so carrying that extra gadget and it’s associated USB cable just seemed like a waste.
Things were great like this, but every so often I’d have a craving for a particular song. I was also annoyed by the roughly 50gb of hard drive space my music took up on my laptop’s hard drive. I could always just copy it all to my desktop’s larger drives, but I wanted to have my music library available while I was on the road, so I just tolerated it.  That was until I learned about Subsonic…

I first head Subsonic mentioned on a forum post discussing various Android apps, but I didn’t really pay attention the first couple times it came up.  About a week ago it came up again in a very positive light, and I headed over to their site to

Android App

see what all the fuss was about.  I installed the lightweight server app on my laptop (comes in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors), and the Android app on my phone (also available for the iPhone), and within minutes I was playing songs from my collection over 3g to my cellphone.  I tested it out over the next couple days during a drive to Saint Cloud, and while at work, and it worked flawlessly, so I donated about $15 for unlimited use of a free personal domain to stream from.  You can stream for free if you set up a domain youself, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle.  The donation gets you a _______.subsonic.org address that is easy to use and remember, and supports the ongoing development of the service.

I was then able to transfer my music library to my home desktop and free up the laptop HDD space.  When I want to play music on my MacBook I just open up SubAir, an Adobe Air app that lets you access and browse your library without leaving a browser window open, and to play music on any computer with an internet connection, I just open up my custom domain in Chrome, login, pick a song, and hit play.  Same thing on my phone, although the Android app saves you the trouble of logging in.  So far it’s been working great, although I have managed to use about 2.5gb of data on Sprint this month thanks to all the streaming I do.

My only dislike is how the music is organized by Subsonic.  The program sorts music by it’s directory structure (instead of ID3 tag data), which would be fine except for the fact that my library has been organized by iTunes for the last few years.  That, combined with the large number of

Web interface

albums with multiple artists I have can make it a pain to find certain songs, but it will be easily remedied once I get a chance to spend some time with something like Mp3 Tag & Rename and rename all the files by their ID3 info, and get them into more logical directories.

Overall, Subsonic is a very handy program, and quite easy to use.  I was even able to have it forward the necessary ports to my desktop automatically!  Eventually I want to build a low-power, low-heat mini-pc to both stream video to our TV (to run quieter, cooler, and handle more file types than the Xbox 360), and handle file server and Subsonic duties, but for now I can deal with leaving my big desktop running.  Subsonic works great, and the devs appear to be actively improving it and adding new features.  It’s free to try, so I can definitely recommend you try it out.