Saturday, October 8, 2011

Subsonic explained


 During my Better than a DVR project I talked a lot about Subsonic but didn't really tell you anything about it. This was my fault, I installed subsonic months ago when I went to PAX east to let me stream my music to my phone and video to my computer while I was traveling. But I never really explained what it was, why I chose it, and how to install it.

I think subsonic is pretty cool all on its own, what you get with subsonic is a light weight web server that serves up a flash based media player, allowing you to easily share music and video across your local network or the Internet to any web enabled device that also has flash player as well as a trans-coder to encode the devices. Add to that an Android, iPhone, and windows phone 7 app for easy streaming to your portable device, and even a hosted web app for portable devices and you have a fairly rich feature set . There is a strong community developing new tools and addons all the time making Subsonic better all the time. You can create individual accounts for users and limit their access as much as you like, want some one to only have access to the web player but not the mobile apps, no problem, want to give some one full admin rights, we can do that too.

So down to installation, these are the Debian/Ubuntu installation instructions.

To Start off with we need to make sure that Java is installed, and we are going to work from the command line because we like it there.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

the next step is to Download the latest version for your OS after that

Sudo dpkg -i subsonic-x.x.deb

The installer will configure subsonic to start automaticly when the system boots after it is installed, but you may have to start it the first time

sudo service subsonic start

once you are sure its running simply go to HTTP://localhost:4040

the config file is located at /etc/default/subsonic you can change port numbers java memory settings and other details there, once you do that remember to restart the service for things to take effect. the logs live at /var/subsonic




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