14 DAY TRIAL // Instead of carrying loads of music files stored on your Android smartphone with you, you can now use a web-based media streamer that will provide quick access to your home music wherever you are.
Basically, you can listen to your own selected music while you are at work, or you can stream music to multiple players, so you can have it in two or more different locations. Developed by Sindre Mehus, Subsonic for Android devices is based on a Java technology and runs on many other platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Unix variants.
Subsonic can handle huge chunks of music files (hundreds of gigabytes). Even though it has been optimized for MP3 streaming, Subsonic seems to be working with most of the audio or video formats that can stream over HTTP, such as AAC and OGG. The application supports on-the-fly conversion and streaming of any audio format, including WMA, FLAC, APE, Musepack, WavPack and Shorten, thanks to the included transcoder plug-ins.
Furthermore, if you think you have a constrained bandwidth, the application enables you to set an upper limit for the bitrate of the music streams. Subsonic will then automatically resample the music to a suitable bitrate. Another feature of Subsonic besides that of streaming media server is the possibility to turn it into a jukebox. Thanks to the easy-to-use web interface, as well as the search and index options, which are optimized for efficient browsing through large media libraries, jukeboxing will be much easier.Subsonic also comes with an integrated Podcast receiver, with many of the same features that can be found in iTunes. Users will also benefit from some basic features of Subsonic such as: cover-art displaying, including images embedded in ID3 tags; common playlist features (add, remove, rearrange, repeat, shuffle, undo, save, load); free-text search; ratings assignments and comments to albums.
Subsonic is an open-source piece of software licensed under the GNU General Public License, so paying for it is not necessary, but you are invited to support the development of the application in case you like it.Note: You can easily follow my guides by subscribing to the RSS feed.
