Thread: Stream your downloaded music from your Seedbox (Subsonic on your [Feral] Seedbox)

Stream your downloaded music from your Seedbox (Subsonic on your [Feral] Seedbox)

First: I just want to make it clear that I am not in any way affiliated with Subsonic or Feral Hosting.

Second: If there is anything that could be done more smoothly in this tutorial, just point it out and I will edit this tutorial to incorporate your advice.

What is Subsonic?
Subsonic is a web-based server that makes it possible to stream your music library (and most movies as well, it seems) to a web browser, your desktop or your mobile phone (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7).

Is it free?
The free version is slightly limited and has ads. If you want to have your own personal server adress, get rid of the ads and be able to stream to your mobile phone after a certain time, you have to donate. There are ways to avoid this, although if you really like Subsonic, then why not give your support?

Why did I install it on my seedbox?
I found it to be awesome in connection with music trackers such as What.cd and Waffles. Besides, Subsonic is very configurable and handles large music libraries extremely well. It doesn't need hours to index your music - just point it to the correct directory and you can start streaming and listening to that album you just downloaded right away.

Prerequisites
Sun Java 5 or later and an open port for the Subsonic server. Apart from this, you will not need root access. Personally, I have a shared seedbox at Feral Hosting. For the Java part, I just opened a ticket and asked to have Java installed. 10 minutes later Java was installed. I did not have any problems with ports not being open.

If you only have a little bit of experience with linux (like me), the procedure of getting Subsonic to work, shouldn't be too hard. If not, I will do my best to guide you through this step by step:

1) Start a terminal, like putty, and log in to your slice.

2) Make a directory (for instance mkdir subsonic) and enter it (cd subsonic).

3) Download the stand-alone version of Subsonic:
wget 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/subsonic/subsonic/4.5/subsonic-4.5-standalone.tar.gz'

4) Unpack the archive:
tar -xzvf subsonic-4.5-standalone.tar.gz

5) Edit the configuration file :
pico subsonic.sh

Make sure you fill in the SUBSONIC_HOME, SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_MUSIC_FOLDER, SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_PODCAST_FOLDER and SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_PLAYLIST_FOLDER entries properly. In my case, on my Feral slice, the beginning of my config file looks like this:

SUBSONIC_HOME=~/subsonic
SUBSONIC_HOST=0.0.0.0
SUBSONIC_PORT=4040
SUBSONIC_HTTPS_PORT=0
SUBSONIC_CONTEXT_PATH=/
SUBSONIC_MAX_MEMORY=100
SUBSONIC_PIDFILE=
SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_MUSIC_FOLDER=~/subsonic/music
SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_PODCAST_FOLDER=~/subsonic/music/Podcast
SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_PLAYLIST_FOLDER=~/subsonic/playlists

Save with CTRL+X.

The tilde sign stands for your home directory. Make sure the folders in the config files exist, otherwise create them (i.e. if you are inside the subsonic directory, type mkdir music etc.).

6) If you want to be able to play for instance FLAC and transcode properly to various formats, make sure you have those transcoders inside a directory called transcode inside your subsonic folder (mkdir transcode). For instance, in my case, I have ffmpeg (making it possible to stream movies as well), lame and flac in the transcode directory. All these three were already installed on the Feral Seedbox, so I only needed to copy them to my transcode directory inside the subsonic folder (symlinks will not work!). In my case I first did a search with the command find. Then I copied the files, for instance on my Feral slice:

cd
cd subsonic/transcode
cp /usr/local/bin/lame ./
cp /usr/bin/flac ./
cp /usr/bin/ffmpeg ./

7) Start the script:
bash subsonic.sh

8) Open a browser on any computer and go to the IP to your seedbox with the correct port, as specified in the config file (in my case, as can be seen from the config file, I have chosen port 4040), i.e. type 85.xx.x.xxx:4040 in the browser URL bar.



9) Follow the instructions, i.e.

a) Change administrator password.
b) Set up media folders.
c) Configure network settings (here you can also choose a domain name for simplicity).
10) ENJOY!

subsonic is awesome, lardo from here at T-I figured out how to crack it.

Aha nice :). For streaming my music library to my iPhone, I tried Audiogalaxy, Orb and Zumocast before finally finding Subsonic (with the iSub iPhone client) which did everything I wanted, like not having to index the music to be able to stream, playlists, caching, offline mode and transcoding etc.

With the pyWHATauto script for What.cd with filters specified for genres I like or releases I'm looking forward to, it's always really nice to see a new e-mail informing me of an auto-download and being able to directly listen to the album from my phone :).

I've been using subsonic for a while now and I'm really satisfied with it, really easy to set up and manage. Though it's kind of tricky if a lot of ports are blocked so you have to tunnel yourself through to get access to the server. :) Haven't tried streaming movies yet but hopefully it'll work as smoothly as streaming music :p

wow, i didnt knew that it was even posibble to do this

It works great for streaming video content too (at least the ones I have tried), although the iPhone/iPad apps don't support video streaming yet. For video streaming, Airvideo is the absolute best, but kind of nightmarish to get to work on a seedbox without root access... although I'm very happy I did get it up and running since it's an extremely convenient setup. Download the latest episodes of your favourite series from BTN and stream them in a matter of seconds to your iPad/iPhone.

Originally Posted by Malevich

For video streaming, Airvideo is the absolute best, but kind of nightmarish to get to work on a seedbox without root access...

so i have been attempting this on my feralhosting seedbox... i put in a ticket to see if they'd apt-get it all for me, no such luck. I grabbed the dependencies and put em in my home dir, but now i cannot ./configure ffmpeg (permission denied). how did you bypass this lacking root access?

I bypassed it by using: ./configure --prefix=[the directory you wish to install in]. Hope this helps! Good luck (because finding the source codes and compiling everything needed will not be effortless).

how did you manage to get libfaac to compile? i get errors, and see that many others have too... SourceForge.net: Freeware Advanced Audio Coder: Detail: 2894310 - Problem compiling faac 1.28

i tried to figure out how to patch libfaac... FAAC-1.28 but i ran into an issue with the patch not finding particular files in the common folder within libfaac...

if i get through this, i will certainly add a writeup like your own for getting air video up and running on a seedbox, hehe.