Installing the Subsonic Web Based Media Streamer on your MediaSmart Server

Subsonic is a free, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Use it to share your music with friends, or to listen to your own music while at work. You can stream to multiple players simultaneously, for instance to one player in your kitchen and another in your living room.

Subsonic is designed to handle very large music collections (hundreds of gigabytes). Although optimized for MP3 streaming, it works for any audio or video format that can stream over HTTP, for instance AAC and OGG. By using transcoder plug-ins, Subsonic supports on-the-fly conversion and streaming of virtually any audio format, including WMA, FLAC, APE, Musepack, WavPack, Shorten and OptimFROG.

It’s also very easy to install on HP’s MediaSmart Server running HP’s 2.5 update.

On podcast 48 we spoke a bit about mp3 streamers Subsonic & FirePlay.  Cougar from MediaSmartServer.net updated his addin here.  I’m also trying Subsonic.  They have a WAR version, this is like a ZIP or RAR compressed folder that is recognized by Tomcat and can be selected to deploy. Since you have HP’s 2.5 update installed, adding Subsonic through Tomcat is very easy.

If you don’t have Tomcat, you can also go the .EXE route or decide to install Tomcat from here.

HP decided to switch from using Jetty to Tomcat when they built the EX48x line. Tomcat runs apps for IIS much better than Jetty and does more. HP uses Tomcat & Java to run the PhotoPublisher & PhotoViewer apps also, so you get an idea of what Tomcat can do. So since it’s there, why not take advantage of it ?

Once you have Tomcat installed, here’s what to do,

Download the WAR and place it in the Software share, then remote into your MSS and look for Tomcat Manager.

You will be asked for a user name and password, use admin and leave the password blank, unless you changed it, then use what you choose, click OK. You should then get the Tomcat Manager screen. At the bottom it says WAR file to deploy in yellow, point the the Subsonic.WAR file you downloaded to the Software share.

and click deploy. If you did this right you should have,

click on start if it didn’t start, or restart it from the 

Now add the port 8089 to the exception list on the firewall settings.

That’s it, point your browser to http://myhomeserver:8089/subsonic.

I’ll be looking for more WAR apps to deploy with Tomcat, if you find one, let me know, thanks.

If your using Whiist, you can add it as a personal link.

Have fun.

John Zajdler (aka Diehard).

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