The question of “How do I access my music collection over the Internet” has a few good solutions. I previously talked about Ampache, which is quite good but gave me some trouble due to the extreme size of my media library. Ampache had to be tweaked to allow an unlimited execution time and higher memory limits in php.ini. While that is easy enough, it never finished cataloging all of my music. While it completed most of it and I was mostly happy with it I am not a “mostly” kind of guy. The hunt was on for something better.
Subsonic is a standalone media streaming application focused around music and built on Java. It has almost total feature overlap with Ampache in that they both have cover art display, tag editing, multiple user support, transcoding, and more. After the library import, they both use around 550MB of active memory with my library. Unlike Ampache, subsonic has a smartphone app that you can use to stream to your mobile device.
The install for subsonic is much easier and has far fewer steps, as the HTTP server and all other necessary software is included in the RPM or DEB. I made an Ubuntu Server VM and, after updating, I just had to navigate to the download page and choose the correct option for the OS. In this case a DEB. SSH into the VM and wget the download link to get it on the local host. Then it is just a matter of dpkg -i subsonic.deb. The install is complete at this point. It’s worth noting though that, unless you wrangle with it, it wants to run as root by default. So it’s best to carve out a whole VM or physical machine dedicated to just subsonic. One more thing to do before you are done configuring the VM is to attach your storage. You might want to dump your music to the VM locally, assuming you made a big enough disk. Since I already have a storage server I just exported an NFS share and mounted it to /mnt in the VM.
After the install your server will be running on that host at port 4040. After pulling up that location in the browser you get a glimpse of the web interface:
After you have changed the password and edited the media folders to access your media you will want to initiate a scan under “Settings” —> “Media folders.” When this is complete your media has been added to the database…but where the heck is it? It took me 20 minutes on the forums to figure this one out. Apparently a newly added option is restricting certain media folders to certain users. So go here:
Check the box corresponding to your media folder name and you are off to the races.
I’ve found the search function to work extremely well, and playlists are easy to make. There is even Last.fm scrobbling if you are into the whole “social music” thing.