Setting up a Subsonic Media Server on Linux

#Written by: Michael Wood
#Date 12-01-2011

First off, 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.

Has really cool features
-An intuitive web interface
-The developer wrote a Subsonic app for the Android platform to stream music to your phone! (Subsonic for Android)
-iPhone users also have cool apps to stream music from a Subsonic server. (iSub, Z-Subsonic, SubStream)
-Pulls in cover art from the Internet by parsing ID3 tags from your audio files
The list goes on...

Check out the list of apps here: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/apps.jsp

Lets begin...
We are going to get a Subsonic server setup and configured properly.  I'll be using putty to SSH into my Linux server for the tutorial.

First, we need to grab the .deb package from the developers site (the package is actually hosted on Sourceforge.net)
sudo wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/subsonic/subsonic/4.5/subsonic-4.5.deb

Install Java:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre (This could take some time)

Install the package:
sudo dpkg -i subsonic-4.5.deb

Selecting previously deselected package subsonic.
(Reading database ... 84670 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking subsonic (from subsonic-4.5.deb) ...
Setting up subsonic (4.5) ...
 Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/subsonic ...
   /etc/rc0.d/K99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
   /etc/rc1.d/K99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
   /etc/rc6.d/K99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
   /etc/rc2.d/S99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
   /etc/rc3.d/S99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
   /etc/rc4.d/S99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
   /etc/rc5.d/S99subsonic -> ../init.d/subsonic
Started Subsonic [PID 17140, /var/subsonic/subsonic_sh.log]
Processing triggers for ureadahead ...

After installing the installer configures your system to start Subsonic automatically.  You can access the web interface at http://localhost:4040
Now if you like tweaking stuff like I do, you can find more advanced configuration settings in /etc/default/subsonic
In the /etc/default/subsonic file you can change stuff like the port number Subsonic listens on.  How much memory is allocated to Java, etc.

Taking a look at /etc/default/subsonic we are going to change the line:
SUBSONIC_ARGS="--max-memory=100"

I want my Subsonic server to listen on a different port than the default of 4040. Also, I will be changing the https port from the default of 443.

Change the line to look like this:
SUBSONIC_ARGS="--port=15500 --https-port=15501 --max-memory=120"

Save the file and run sudo /etc/init.d/subsonic restart

Now I should be able to access https://localhost:15501 and setup the rest of my Subsonic server.  Once you login to the web interface you can point Subsonic to the directory where your music resides.  Setup SSL certificates, configure transcoding (if you don't have the bandwidth or if you are streaming over 3G).

Oh and don't forget to open the ports on your router/firewall.  Have fun!