Scratching Itches: Listening to Music
In this series I’ll be talking about little lifehacks I have found that work for me.
All my music is stored in one location, but I want to be able to listen to it from work, in the car or wherever I go.
I hardly ever plug my phone into my computer and I don’t want to have to manually sync my music over. I want to be able to listen to my latest music without syncing.
My criteria for a solution:
- don’t want to have to sync anything
- in browser
- mobile accessible
And So I Found… Subsonic
- iphone & android apps (which can cache songs onto the phone)
- accessible in the browser
- user authentication
- last.fm scrobbling
- playlist support
- multi-user
The downside of running subsonic is that there is some setup. You need a dedicated machine to run the server and set up port forwarding through your router if you want to access it externally. Using no-ip.com helps so I don’t have to remember an IP address to access subsonic. Subsonic also has to transcode the audio to the bitrate of your choice so you can’t skip positions right away (unless the song is already cached on your device).
The music player also is flash (which isn’t so great on linux especially on a 64-bit OS).
Subsonic can also eat up bandwidth when streaming to something outside the network. I had to mitigate this using QoS on my DD-WRT router.
Long-term conclusion
I’ve been using this setup for almost a year and I’ve had no problems with it. I listen to my music on my phone, listen to music in the browser at work and home (no native music player needed).
