Subsonic 2.9 review
DownloadSubsonic is a free, web-based media streamer
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Subsonic is a free, web-based media streamer. Although primarily designed for MP3, it works for any audio or video format that can stream over HTTP (for instance WMA and OGG).
With Subsonic you have access to your entire music collection wherever you are. Use Subsonic application 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 (many thousand albums). It uses a combination of directory structure and tag parsing to organize the music.
If you have constrained bandwidth, you may set an upper limit for the bitrate of the music streams. Subsonic will then automatically resample the music to a suitable bitrate. (Supported for MP3 only).
In addition to being a streaming media server, Subsonic works very well as a local jukebox. The intuitive web interface, as well as search and index facilities, are optimized for efficient browsing through large media libraries.
Subsonic is free software distributed under the LGPL open-source licence.
Here are some key features of "Subsonic":
Supports MP3, OGG, AAC, WMA and any other music or video format that can be streamed over HTTP.
Works with any network-enabled media player, such as Winamp, iTunes, XMMS, MusicMatch and Windows Media Player.
Displays cover art, dynamically scaling it to fit nicely on the screen.
Finds cover art and album info using Amazon Web Services.
On-the-fly resampling to lower bitrates using the high-quality LAME encoder (MP3 only).
Common playlist features (add, remove, rearrange, repeat, shuffle, undo).
Playlists can be saved and restored. Both M3U and PLS formats are supported.
Configurable index.
Google-like search functionality.
Automatic update of search index at specified intervals.
Supports multiple simultaneous players. The playlist for any player can be managed from any location.
Secure. Users must log in using a username and password.
Lean web interface optimized for constrained bandwidth environments and efficient browsing through large music collections.
WAP interface allows you to control Subsonic from any mobile phone or PDA.
In addition to streaming, single files or entire directories may be downloaded from Subsonic.
Files can be uploaded to Subsonic. Zip-files can be automatically unpacked.
Implements the SHOUTcast protocol. Players which support this (including Winamp, iTunes and XMMS) will display the current artist and song name.
Provides links to album reviews and more at allmusic.com.
Supports internationalization. Currently, English and Norwegian translations are provided.
What's New in This Release:
This release contains some significant performance and quality improvements.
Excessive disk and memory usage when (re)scanning the music library has been eliminated.
Thumbnails are now cached on disk; expect significant speed-ups (after a while), particularly for huge images.
The thumbnail quality has been improved using step-wise bilinear resampling.
Searching is now twice as fast. Wiki markup is now supported in album comments.
Spanish and German translations have been added.
Subsonic 2.9 search tags