struggling

[robbruckshaw]

hi, i thought subsonic was a fantastic idea, however i really am not too impressed with it's useability.

I find it far too complex to set up and use and it's GUI is far from what it could be. I get a lot of playback issues, songs are not played back without pauses and skipping. I have had these issues with mp3 @ 320kbps, ogg, flac, wav.

I appreciate it is free to use, but after donating, i'm starting to wish i hadn't

I apologise if i sound like a moaning, complaining, never satisfied type, i assure you it isn't in my nature, but i really had high, yet realistic hopes that haven't materialised.

Regards,

Rob Bruckshaw

[hakko]

I fail to see why you donated if you feel like that?

[Castius]

Have you tried to fixing your problem in any way? Sounds like you have a bandwidth issue not subsonic.

I think the UI could be sexier but it's very functional as it is. But there are some people working on that as well.
Take a look at parisonic and minisub for chrome they are really impressive free alternatives. As well as other mods.
You're going to get more out of subsonic the more you put into it.

Subsonic is not without issues but most problems are usually not with subsonic.
The only issue i have right now is the android app repeating songs.
Other than that I've only wanted new feature. The community here have done a ton of work to help with that.

[GJ51]

hi, i thought subsonic was a fantastic idea, however i really am not too impressed with it's useability.

I find it far too complex to set up and use and it's GUI is far from what it could be. I get a lot of playback issues, songs are not played back without pauses and skipping. I have had these issues with mp3 @ 320kbps, ogg, flac, wav.

I appreciate it is free to use, but after donating, i'm starting to wish i hadn't

I apologise if i sound like a moaning, complaining, never satisfied type, i assure you it isn't in my nature, but i really had high, yet realistic hopes that haven't materialised.

Regards,

Rob Bruckshaw

There's no doubt that Subsonic is more complex than most programs you're likely to use, but you have to accept that if you want the power and versatility that SS provides. Because of that it takes a bit more testing and tweaking than other applications.

Transcoding throws a lot of variables into the mix that most users aren't prepared to deal with. You also have to realize that there is a wide range of hardware involved that can affect performance. You haven't provided many details so it's hard guess what your issue might or how best to help you fix it.

If you're on ver. 4.6, I would recommend dropping back to ver 4.5 to see if that helps. There were some structural changes in 4.6 that didn't pan out as well as they should have and you may be affected. I have all music formats, including 1500kbps flac files transcoding and running smoothly. It can be done, but we would need more specific information regarding your platform in order to give you a hand.

[ytechie]

Absolutely. I use 4.5, and I have modded my instance of Subsonic so much that I'm sort of hoping 4.7 isn't too special

I don't want to upgrade. I've spent days (more) making subsonic awesomely awesome.

[sir2u]

what kind of hardware are you running subsonic on? what kind of bandwidth are you running on both the client and server when your files skip or pause? there's a bottleneck that you're hitting that's causing the performance issues you're coming experiencing.

as for usability, i'd agree that the ui isn't THE sexiest out there, but it's functional enough to do mostly everything i need, albeit not in the most efficient way possible. the big winner for me is the mobility that subsonic allows. wherever i'm at, on the road with just my phone or at work on a laptop, i have my entire library available to me.

[supra92]

Random comment on the UI aspect...

I appreciate that SS's UI isn't "sexy" per se --- too many modern interfaces try too hard to impress and have that 'wow factor', but the problem is that 'wow factor' and usability aren't always the same thing, and sometimes are at odds with each other. I find Subsonic's web interface to be quite classy and logical -- it fits a lot of information into a screen with its panes, and my eyes aren't bombarded with animations and crazy graphics and special effects. When it comes to my music, the only real graphics I want to see are album covers

The one thing I will say is that Subsonic rocks much harder on a higher-resolution screen, such as the 1920x1200 I run on this Dell 24" Ultrasharp monitor. None of the frames have scrollbars in them (except for the artist pane on the left of course), and it's just very pleasing to the eye. I like it so much that I actually use it as my main media server downstairs in the living room on the 60" Samsung plasma and home theatre system. My biggest issue there isn't SS itself, but rather a media center-friendly remote that I could use sort of like a pointer to move the cursor around to select things. Haven't found a great solution yet for that...

Supra92

[GJ51]

Welcome back Supra92, glad to hear you've got things on track and have time to post again.

I agree with most of what you've said. I use 24" monitors (3) and SS looks great on them in Chrome; a nice clean appearence. I am a bit disappointed however that the frames can't be adjusted onscreen, that seems like it should be a no-brainer in that just about every other application today lets you resize borders. I would also like to see the ability to select the number of albums displayed horizontally and vertically on the random screen, and have SS remember the settings until you change them again. I've requested at least making the drop down albums per page selector "sticky" several times; but I guess it's not a priority. With only 5 accross on a 24" display you've got a lot of wasted real estate at full screen.

I do agree though, clean and simple works just fine for me too.

[supra92]

Thanks for the kind words, Gary -- I always liked your occupation in your profile, and plan on the same someday, but for now I'll have to be content with "gainfully slaving for The Man"

Concurred with the point about the number of albums displayed horizontally on the random screen -- I don't think I'd noticed that too much because the albums do span the entire width when viewing an Artist's albums, but just yesterday I was hacking SS so that it would display "Recently Added" by default instead of "Random", and I definitely noticed it then. Lots of unused real estate in those views. I'd have to think it wouldn't be too difficult for SS to do a simple client screen resolution detect, whereby one states the # of rows to display and SS determines how many would fit in each row based on screen resolution. As you said, probably not the highest on Sindre's to-do list, however.

Also did the code mod to make permanent the 15 albums per page view on the Random and Recently Added views (to utilise more vertical space), which mostly works except for when you hit Cancel in some of the Settings screens, in which case it jumps right back to 10 again. Having that 'sticky' would be nice -- limiting the number of code mods one has to do for each upgrade/release is always a plus.

The one UI feature for which I've debated submitting a Feature Request is to have what I suppose I'd call an "Album Art Playing Mode". It only occurred to me after I started using Subsonic downstairs on the 60" plasma; in a living room where one is standing further away, the classy Subsonic interface can be a bit small to the eye. I wouldn't mind a mode whereby once you start playing a song, or album, or playlist, Subsonic goes to a simpler view where the album art of the currently playing song is displayed on the left half of the screen taking up the entire height/vertical, while the right side of the screen shows five lines of information in large text: Artist Name, Song Title, Album Name, Album Year, and TimeElapsed / TrackLength. That would bring out the details of album art nicely, and make it easier to see what exactly is playing at that moment. The Mode could be exited via the Esc key to return to the standard SS interface, etc. Granted, if one utilised that mode often then one would certainly want to choose album art JPEGs that were at least 1080x1080 in size (or at least something close to it) to avoid either tiny album art on the bigscreen or ugly pixellated zooms of low-res jpegs.

[otis_bartleh]

I'm a LONG time user of Subsonic, but I too have had problems recently with tracks digitally skipping, a few times during each song, even if the song is saved on my phone. I've tried eliminating all variables, even uninstalled Subsonic from my phone, rebooted, and re-downloaded from the market and set it up fresh.... No change. I can play a song on Subsonic and have it skip a few times during the song, and then play the same song on Mixzing and have it play perfect.

This has gotten so bad that I can not even use Subsonic anymore except to download songs to my phone from my server, and then I need to play them in another player to actually be able to listen to the song cleanly. I saw mention of reverting to an older version, are you referring to the phone app or the server program?

Running Android ICS on a Galaxy Nexus. And for what its worth, I've also tried bumping my minimum cpu clock to just under max, but it still happens...

I love this app, and talk great things about it, especially how much better it is than Google Music, but recently, it really is unusable as a player for me. Any help is GREATLY appreciated!