My iTunes Web Application project shows up on the first page of results for most relevant search. More than 60 people clicked on search results for it on Google in September 2009. I would say this is a good thing. However, I doubt it is what most people are actually looking for. I really do recommend Subsonic or even Sockso over my own project. Unless someone is looking to continue work on my project. I would recommend that, too.
Tag: Subsonic
Pandora Alternatives
When Pandora announced a 40 hour cap on free listening, I decided to investigate some alternatives to Pandora. (I probably had been listening to 40 hours of music on Pandora in a week!) I quickly found Slacker. Slacker provides web-based music streaming in a similar manner to Pandora. I have found that they provide a tighter selection of music and that their music discovery has not been quite as good. This is probably because it is not based on the Music Genome Project. However, much like Pandora, after listening for a while, the selection has improved. Slacker’s commercials are a bit more radio-like and therefore more intrusive; however, they don’t have a cap so it’s hard to complain. Since I don’t always have my music on the machine I am on, I have also been taking advantage of my installation of Subsonic to listen to music.
Both Pandora and Slacker have mobile clients available for the BlackBerry. I have both installed, and both work well on 3G and WiFi. I don’t use the mobile clients very often, but when I want some music, and I am not at my computer, it’s convenient to have the option to play music right from my BlackBerry. Subsonic is supposed to stream to mobile devices, but I have yet to get that working.
Another benefit is that the LastFM Firefox Extension supports both Pandora and Slacker so I can continue “scrobbling” my tracks to Last.fm. Subsonic has built in support for Last.fm “scrobbling.”
Edit: Recently, I have started listening to my “library” on Last.fm. This feature plays songs that I have already listened to. I am not sure how Last.fm select songs, but I would assume it is based on what I have listened to most often. Since I have “scrobbled” a large number of songs, Last.fm does a decent job of playing songs for me. It’s still not as good as Pandora, and I imagine it would do much worse on smaller sets of “scrobbled” songs.
Configure a Reverse Proxy with Apache
In a previous post, I discussed the details required to set up Subsonic on Ubuntu Server. The problem with Subsonic is that it runs on Tomcat on a non-standard port. The rest of my web applications run in Apache on port 80. Therefore, it would be nice if instead of having to go to http://athos.zacintosh.com:8180/subsonic/, I could simply go to http://athos.zacintosh.com/subsonic/. The solution is called a reverse proxy. Reverse proxies can do things like load balance between multiple web servers or simply make resources on an internal web server available externally. In this case, I am using a reverse proxy to make a web application available on a different port available on the standard port 80.
The set up is fairly simple. On Ubuntu, it should be as simple as issuing this command (as root) to enable the proxy modules:
a2enmod proxy_http
Next I inserted the following into /etc/apache2/conf.d/subsonic.conf to make it available on all websites running on my server. If you only wanted it to be available for a single website, you could insert this into a site inside of /etc/apache2/sites-available/.
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
<Proxy *>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass /subsonic/ http://localhost:8180/subsonic/
ProxyPassReverse /subsonic/ http://localhost:8180/subsonic/
The configuration above says to not proxy all requests (not act as a forward proxy server). The ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse set up the actual retrieval of data from Subsonic running on Tomcat. You need to replace the localhost and the port number with the specific items for your configuration. Finally, you need to reload the Apache configuration:
/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
Now Subsonic should be available on port 80 just like everything else running on your web server with Apache.
Install Subsonic on Ubuntu Server
Subsonic is a free, web-based media streaming application. After evaluating it alongside Jinzora and Sockso, I selected it for use on my servers. Internally, I have been using Firefly Media Server (previously called mt-daapd) to make music available to different desktop music players. Subsonic had several features that made it a good choice including allowing music from several different directories, Last.fm scrobbling support/integration, and multiple users with passwords and support for LDAP integration.
I installed Subsonic on a server running Ubuntu Hardy Heron Server. I built on a previous tutorial for installing Subsonic on Ubuntu.
First, I install the necessary Java packages, Tomcat, and Lame. I broke it into three installs to be safe. It could probably be done in one.
apt-get install java-common sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre apt-get install tomcat5.5 apt-get install lame
Next, I stopped Tomcat before changing the Tomcat configuration and installing the Subsonic web application.
/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 stop
Next, I disabled the Tomcat security stuff. It’s required for Subsonic to work. You could do this by editing the file directly (/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5), but I use Sed so that I can automate the installation process in a script.
cd /etc/init.d/ mv tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5.bak sed "s/TOMCAT5_SECURITY=yes/TOMCAT5_SECURITY=no/" tomcat5.5.bak > tomcat5.5 chmod +x tomcat5.5 rm tomcat5.5.bak
Next, I downloaded, decompressed, and installed the subsonic application.
cd /tmp/ wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/subsonic/subsonic-3.6-war.zip unzip subsonic-3.6-war.zip -d subsonic mv subsonic/subsonic.war /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps/
Subsonic expects certain directories to exist. The following creates those directories and sets the permissions.
mkdir /var/subsonic mkdir /var/subsonic/playlists mkdir /var/subsonic/transcode chown -R tomcat55:nogroup /var/subsonic
Subsonic uses Lame to transcode/compress mp3s for streaming. The next two lines make Lame available to Subsonic.
cd /var/subsonic/transcode ln -s /usr/bin/lame lame
Now we can start Tomcat again.
/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 start
I always like to clean up after my installs. This removes the files we downloaded and no longer need any more.
rm -R /tmp/subsonic*
Subsonic should now be running and available at http://localhost:8180/subsonic/. The port might vary depending on the installation of Tomcat. Log in. You can change the password by clicking on “Settings” and then “Users” and then selecting the admin account.
Next, I configured LDAP authentication. It was as simple as clicking on “Settings” and then “Advanced” and then “Enable LDAP authentication.” I then filled in the following:
- LDAP URL: ldap://athos.lund:389/dc=lund
- LDAP search filter: (uid={0})
I left the “LDAP manager DN” and “Password” blank. I checked “Automatically create users in Subsonic” so that any user in LDAP can automatically log into Subsonic.
If you would like to make Subsonic available on port 80 like most web applications instead of port 8180, check out my post on Reverse Proxies.