Eagle Eye Cherry – Permanent Tears

Subsonic is a brilliant piece of software that you can use to stream your music collection over the web. Imagine being able to login from a friend’s place and share with them realtime the tune that’s come up in conversation, or imagine being able to play your music at work via HTTP, bypassing all but the most nazi of corporate firewalls.

I have recently consolodated my collection of multimedia and various other things onto a second hand Apple Mac Mini with an external 1Tb drive. This is in turn connected to my 42″ plasma and functions as our loungebox, almost perfectly. There are a few niggles such as Quicktime and Frontrow not really having decent aspect ratio handling – watching things either letterboxed or megazoomed is not cool.

I have, however, found it irritating to play music from my collection off this box on my other PC’s, and sitting at work and having that urge to hear a song, and not having that itch scratched by youtube irritates the living bejesus out of me. So these are my notes on getting Subsonic working on my Mac Mini.

Firstly, download the latest standalone version and extract it to /Applications, renaming /Applications/subsonic-3/ to /Applications/subsonic/. The instructions will tell you to install it in /var but that’s just dumb. Then in /Applications/subsonic/ edit subsonic.sh to reflect the changes you want – most basically that the folder that subsonic is in, and that the java directory is /usr/bin/java (getting rid of $JAVA_HOME/some/nonsense/bin) or whatever the standard script has.

Then test it in the terminal: cd to /Applications/subsonic/ and issue ./subsonic.sh and see what happens. It will probably pour out a bunch of text but will otherwise work fine. Jump into http://localhost:8080 and see if you’re away laughing. Login to the admin interface and have a poke around – point it at the directory your music is in and then kick off an indexing for the search functionality to work.

Later on I’ll update this post with information on how to setup lame and various other plugins that are required to get advanced stuff such as on-the-fly restreaming, but otherwise a picture says a thousand words:

I was able to stream some music at a friend’s bbq on the weekend, and have been streaming music to work without any problems. YMMV depending on your internet connection and routes on both sides, and whether or not you have a data cap (I don’t)