Subsonic Forum

Dear all,

I have had no success trying to combine the "External Player" (with or without playlist) with Rhythmbox. Would anyone be so kind as to provide a clear description of what the External Player functionality is, and a step-by-step guide to using it with external players, mainly Rhythmbox?

Many thanks!

Last time I tried you couldn't use RhythmBox as an external player as it didn't support HTTP authentication at the time.

I've tried it with VLC and that works so here's a quick run down of how to do it.

1. Setup a "player" in the subsonic web interface as an "external player with playlist". (Edit an existing one or use "clone player"). Make sure the box that says "automatically start playing" is unticked.

2. In the web interface select the player you just setup.

3. Add the tracks you want to the playlist just as you would with the web player.

4. Now click "play" (near the bottom where the web player use to be). If your browser is setup correctly you will be asked to save a .m3u file. This is a streaming playlist that can be opened by many media players. Save the .m3u file somewhere on your computer

5. Open the .m3u with your chosen media player (e.g. VLC, Amarok, Winamp)

Note HTTP credentials are needed because you are using a completly seperate program to stream the media from your broswer so even though you're logged in using your browser you will be asked to authenticate again when opening the .m3u file.

Note if the application you use to open the the .m3u file can't provide login credentials (if I remember rightly smplayer doesn't provide a GUI option like VLC so you have to manually specifiy the username and password on the command line).

If you want something more native, i.e. An application that integrates the music selecting and playing experience (instead of having to use your browser to select the music as in my previous instructions) then you will need to use a purpose built client.

Some clients include:
Subsonic for Android
SubAir (cross platform, requires Adobe Air)
iSub for iOS

As an aside I hate RhythmBox, crashes with segfaults when you adjust the volume slider sometimes...

Hope this helps.

Ok, thank you for the comprehensive overview! I tried with Rhythmbox and Banshee and it wouldn't work, so I was starting to think maybe I was missing something obvious.

Thank you very much!

Hi, you should use Nightingale which is a fork of Songbird, the audio player by Mozilla. It works perfectly, and it's the only one for Linux (i tried numerous player and whether it can't read the m3u or it crashed.

Okay, i found the ultimate audio player for Linux. It's called Clementine :
http://www.clementine-player.org