Take Your Music With You Everywhere Using Subsonic

I have lots of music sitting on my computer, gathered over time. Yet often when I listen to it I'm somewhere else - and as much as the storage capacity of music players and mobile phones increased over the years, it's still much too small to hold it all. Having to choose what to copy to my mobile device is annoying - I listen to one kind of music in the background when I'm working, and something else when I'm in the gym; while driving I usually prefer podcasts or audiobooks; and it's a hassle to change the selection often enough so I don't listen to the same stuff over and over.

A few days ago I finally found the perfect solution - given that my mobile phone is always connected and my home computer has ample bandwidth, why not just stream the music directly? Subsonic does just that - it's a simple media streaming software, with matching desktop, web and mobile apps that allow you to browse and listen to your music from any device with internet connection. 

After a quick setup you just point it to your music folder and it's accessible from anywhere. It has additional useful features such as creating different users, so you can share the music with friends, or transcoding on-the-fly between different formats, which allows you to convert file formats your phone might not support (such as flac, ogg, etc..) into streaming mp3. 

And there's the issue of bandwidth. When my phone is connected to WiFi I might not care about it too much but on 3G connection even my 5GB monthly data plan will come short if I'm listening all day at work. Here on-the-fly transcoding comes to help, since you can define different bitrate limits for 3G vs. WiFi connections, for different users or for mobile vs. web/desktop players. After some experimentation, I've actually configured it so stream  music to my phone in ogg format (at 112 kbs for 3G) to save bandwidth since it's a newer and more efficient encoding than mp3. Last but not least is the Offline option - the mobile app stores a cache of your downloaded music on the phone (I set it to 1GB for now), so you can listen to those tracks even when you're not connected.

So how do you get started?

Download Subsonic here and follow the guide. If you decide to get a little deeper, you can get some more details about configuring transcoding here, or - just ask me.

All I can add is not only I've been able listen to anything I want these last few days, wherever I am, I was also able to listen to many of the new albums which were waiting for me to check out but I didn't have the time for before.