Streaming music with the Subsonic Android app

#Written by: Michael Wood
#Date: 12/5/2011

This article is the second part to "Setting up a Subsonic Media Server on Linux" located here:
http://codersresource.com/linux/web-server/setting-up-a-subsonic-media-server-on-linux

After you follow the instructions in the tutorial above, this tutorial will show you how to setup the Subsonic Android app and configure it to stream from the Subsonic server!

Let's get started.
First go to the Android Market on your Android device and do a search for "Subsonic"

Download and install the application and run it.

Hit the menu option on your Android device and access "Settings"

In the section "Servers" you will see three servers already listed.  These are just demo servers.  Go ahead and click on one of them and we will start modifying some settings.

Click on the "Name" option and change it to whatever you like.  I just choose "Subsonic Home Server".  This will show up on the app's main interface.

Now, click on "Server address".  You need to change this to whatever your registered domain is.  If you followed the tutorial "Setting up a Subsonic Media Server on Linux" the "Server address" would look like this:
https://domainname.com:15501
Change the domainname.com to whatever your domain name is, also if you didn't use the same port as I did when you setup the server part of Subsonic change it here.  If you are just looking to stream locally on your network and not opening ports on your router/firewall change it to something like this:
https://hostname:15501     <---hostname should be the computer name
https://10.10.1.1:15501    <---change the IP address to whatever that machine's IP address is

Also, the default username is admin.  When you login into the web interface it should have asked you to change the password.  Change the username and password to whatever you setup.  Now test the connection to the server.

After you have that part configured, access "Theme" under "Appearance".  Change to "Dark". Only reason I'm showing you this, is because the default theme is horrendous in my opinion and the dark theme just looks better.  Easier on the eyes too!

Now, under "Network" access the option "Max Bitrate - Wi-Fi".  This can usually be set to "Unlimited" if you are streaming over WiFi in your home.

Access "Max Bitrate - Mobile".  If you setup transcoding from the server side you can set this option so it doesn't take up much bandwidth, especially over a 3G/4G connection.  I have mine set to "192 Kbps". Make sure you have a pretty decent server to do this, transcoding audio files to a lower bitrate while the server is transferring data can be processor intensive.

Last, under "Music cache" access "Cache size".  Your sdcard is used as a cache to store music that is streamed to your phone.  If you don't have an sdcard or a smaller one in your phone, you would probably want to set this to something smaller than "5 GB" like I have.  I could probably go higher since I have a 32 GB sdcard but I feel like this is sufficient.

The rest of the settings are user choice in my opinion.  But that should be it.  Play around with the app and stream to your hearts content!