I remember a time when I had a walkman. Oddly enough, it doesn’t feel that long ago. I remember having to carry all my tapes with me, and having to flip the damn thing every time I wanted to hear more. I remember if I wanted to hear a song again, I had to press rewind and wait for it to get back to the beginning. I also had one of those cheap walkmans, so there wasn’t any happy “seek” function to be able to tell me whether or not it had reached the track I wanted to hear. A lot of times, I had to hear bits and pieces, then click the rewind button or fast forward button over and over until I was sure I was at the beginning of the track. It got to the point where I’d finally just gotten lazy and figured any time I listened to tape, I’d just listen to the whole thing.
Then I got a CD player. I remember back when CD-ROM was the coolest new thing for computers… we had one on our Packard Bell computer running Windows 95. I mean wow! CD’s! And now I can play a cd portably?! This was by far the most aweseomest awesomeness I could ever ask for. No more flipping sides, no more rewind/fast-forward nonsense… It actually gave me time to listen to a variety of different music styles. I’d burn CD’s like a wild pirating monkey, and I’d listen to playlist after playlist of stuff.
The problem was the max time alotted to the CD. I had to carry around multiple CD’s just so I wouldn’t get bored. Today, I’m not in the mood for rap, I want metal. Nah, I want ambient. Nah, I want old school funk… it just never ended.
I remember the option on my Windows XP cd burner saying I could burn a CD, which only allowed me 80 minutes, or I could burn an MP3 disc, which meant I could put TONS of music on there up to about 800 mb. 800mb?! That’s almost a gig! I sought out players that would play this mp3 disc, and went through quite a few of ‘em in high school. I put all kinds of things on there, and didn’t have to carry around so many CD’s all the time. I felt I was hot shit because kids in school had to bring their big bulky CD case full of CD’s. Nice collection, and btw, does your back hurt from carrying it around? “Nah man, this is only what I listen to a lot… I got like 20 more of these cases at home full of CD’s.” That’s great and all, but I realized the CD was a pain in the ass. Sure, you get the booklet and the case and all that… but do you really want to flip through all that crap just to listen to your favorite songs? MP3 Disc it was…
And then I got too much music. I wound up carrying like 10 MP3 discs around, because I had too much music. I just kept collecting and collecting… hoarding it all. Throw me on that Hoarders show, because I definitely hoard music. The difference is music doesn’t take up physical space and make people think you have a problem.
MP3 Disc players kept breaking down… the cd would inevitably get scratched, or the player would get damaged from all the times i’d accidentally drop it or just use it… the lens would fail, the headphones would fail… it was just a neverending cycle of annoyance with this thing.
I finally got this device that didn’t hold battery for longer than about 4 hours called a something or other… Shut up, I forgot the name. What I do remember is it held 30GB of media, including video and pictures. Not bad, not bad… and did you say thirty gb? That’ll hold my entire collection! And held it all it did…
Until…
You know, you just run outta space after a while. That and it was getting annoying whenever I’d stumble on a music file that was in some special format the thing couldn’t play. This file plays in the other player, and on the pc… why won’t it play here? It was just a constant annoyance.
Enter the IPOD. Oh yes, as much as I hate apple, I couldn’t say no to that ipod classic 160GB player. Not because of the features, or itunes, or any of that jazz… I just wanted the 160GB worth of music with me at all times.
I found it difficult to use because every computer I plugged it into had to have itunes, and it had to synchronize. And if I’d already synchronized it to one computer, I couldn’t synchronize it with another unless I wanted to completely erase my ipod (what a stupid feature). I didn’t get it, and it had even more problems playing files than that other thing I can’t remember the name of. Sometimes the file would play on other mp3players, the old player I had, and on the pc, but not the ipod. it would play in itunes, but not the ipod… what the hell? Half the time I’d just plug the thing into the pc and use winamp to play everything off the ipod’s hard drive, thereby completely circumventing the ipod’s stupid interface.
But, you can’t go wrong with 160GB right? And you’d be wrong. That was only “most” of my collection on the ipod… and the ipod had to have everything in a special format. One day, the ipod just decided for no good reason to fail on songs I knew it could play, then stuff got corrupted… Then in an effort to fix itself while plugged in, it decided to erase more than half my music away. I was done with the ipod, and done with apple.
For Christ’s sake, look, I just want a device that plays music and allows me to carry my entire collection around with me… is that too much to ask!?
After I’d set up a webserver at home, I got this crazy idea: what if I could stream my music from home like a radio station? I could always have whatever playlist I wanted playing, and anyone could listen to it.
Research time! Most services I found were paid services… even google’s was (if you have a small collection, it’s free… but for the magnitude of my collection, not so much). It may be free now, but I couldn’t share it. Come on, there had to be a way to do it from my server I ran at home…
I stumbled upon Ampache. I had only learned how to set up an apache server, and even then my knowledge wasn’t very expansive… I knew very little about what I was doing. Here I was, now, setting up an Ampache server. I might also mention I didn’t know how to mount external hard drives either, so I had to store all my music on the server’s small hard drive. I only stored what was absolutely necessary… the hard drive is only 80gb.
The setup went something like this:
1 | download a tar.gz |
So, after about a week of configuring, toying, and tweaking, I finally had an Ampache server up and running. hooray! I felt so proud of myself, and the music streamed even to my blackberry curve! I did it all by myself. Sure, it took me like a week to get the damn thing working, but I did it! It lacked some features, though, and I found that rather annoying. The one feature I really wanted was the ability to add and remove files on the fly and have it continue to play. But hey, I spent a week on this damn thing, and now it works, and you just shut up with your complaints mister! :D
I posted about it on facebook. It went something like this:
“Hooray! After a week of trying, I finally got Ampache up and running on my server! Now I can stream music anywhere!”
The first reply was “Um… have you heard of Subsonic?”
No, actually, I hadn’t.
Some brief research into it told me that it was most definitely more well put together than Ampache was. Ampache at the time felt very hackish, and sometimes it just flat out wouldn’t work. Alright, sir, I’ll try Subsonic.
This is how setting up and using Subsonic went:
1 | dpkg -i Subsonic.deb |
No configuring… no anything. Like a self-extracting outdoor tent, it just sprung into being with no effort at all.
Fair enough, well-played Subsonic… But can you stream music? Quick test, and… yes. Yes you can… Right out of the box, everything works…
Are you kidding me? What took me a week to get working in Ampache, I got working in Subsonic within 5 minutes. This tool is amazing. I’m not sure how far along Ampache has come since the end of 2011 when I finally got rid of it, but Subsonic had far more features than Ampache did. Subsonic’s interface is a lot slicker, and as of 2011 it had a great android app that you could get for free (still free as of this writing). The only thing I had to do in order to make it work for real with the mobile apps was donate $10 to its developer. A simple paypal donation, and I’d get access to every single feature. Anyone would be able to access my server and play music, and anyone with an iOS or Android device could download the free subsonic apps on it and connect to my server and listen to my music… all for free.
It sprung to life out of the box, required little configuration (I had to learn how to make a reverse proxy in apache so I didn’t require my users to type a port number), had more features, and an intuitive interface.
I happily donated that $10, and have been satisfied with subsonic as of this writing for a year and a half. A one-time $10 donation that went straight to the developer to remove the headache and frustration of Ampache, as well as gaining the one thing I wanted most: the ability to access my entire music collection any time I wanted, wherever I was. That was $10 well-spent, and I urge anyone reading this to do the same.
As of this writing, here are my current music stats:
1,594 artists
4,675 albums
53,702 songs
342.01 GB
3,363 hours of media
Kudos to Subsonic: the best music streaming service I’ve ever used!