Share Subsonic between computers

[john.doe]

Hi

Me and my brothers want to share our music collection.
each one of us live in a different area.
I wonder if there's a way we can be on the same domain, when each one will share it's music collection.

thanks.
j

[GJ51]

I'm sure it's theoretically possible, if you own the domain name and get into Active directory and all kinds of stuff that's used in the corporate world.

But for the average user, you'll probably save a ton of time and money if you just download each other's libraries to your servers. After all, a good 2TB drive can be found for $79 -$99. You could also just mail a drive around to create the consolidated library for distribution. Once you've matched libraries, you can use the upload feature to keep each other up to date.

[john.doe]

You could also just mail a drive around to create the consolidated library for distribution. Once you've matched libraries, you can use the upload feature to keep each other up to date.

please explain again... I don't seem to understand what you're saying.

10x

[alphawave7]

That's because it's unclear what you're asking. Does each brother want to possess, or simply access one another's tunes? Or do you want to set up one central server for access to all?

[john.doe]

I want to access ONE WEB GUI which will contain music from SEVERAL DIFFERENT computers with DIFFERENT IP's.

[GJ51]

OK, the long answer. You would need to buy a domain name and purchase a static ip from your isp. You would then set up a domain controller at the host site. Each remote site would then have to be joined to the domain over the internet and incorporated into an Active Directory Structure that joined the subdirectories on each computer that you want to access music files on. You could even get into fail over clustering and all manner of mirroring and load balancing so that data is always available and traffic requests are routed to the server that is under the lowest load.

An interesting project, if ... you've got a LOT of time, money, and IT expertise. You'd also probably need really good computing power at each location and really high speed internet connections.

Otherwise, just pass a disk around and put all the files on each other's server.

[utopian]

what about hamachi ? vpn between PCs.. map corresponding drives to each others music folders..would that work ?

[GJ51]

That sounds like a possibility. I've never used Hamachi, but I guess it would be worth looking into trying.

Utopian, you ever solve your m4a problem?

[Saiboogu]

Utopian is onto something -- You could use Hamachi or something similar to create a VPN, and then just use windows file sharing to share folders. Then you can each install Subsonic locally. Problem is, the VPN and shared files will be very slow. I've heard people complain that Subsonic becomes almost unusable when large collections are shared from a linux NAS to a Windows server due to lag scanning, so I can't even imagine what the latency across-country would cause.

You could also get each of your collections on a NAS or some other device that will accept SSH. Rent a web server (small VPS should do it), and map each of your collections via SSH, then install Subsonic to share the combined library. Might be quicker. May not though, might just be universally slow for all of it.

Honestly, GJ51 was on to something with his first post. It isn't really realistic to network your collections and use Subsonic -- there isn't any way to make it work in a satisfying manner (ie - it'll take Subsonic, which is awesome, and make it a huge pain to use, if it works at all). Make it easy -- The two of you should buy a large external drive. Something like this. One of you copies all your music to it and mails it to the other. He copies your music on to his drive, then copies the stuff you were missing back to the drive. Mail it back. Repeat every few months to keep your collections up to date.

You should also each install Subsonic locally and give each other accounts. Then you can still sample each other's new music in between trades of the hard drive, and use the download feature to trade small updates, like a new album.

[GJ51]

After using SS for a while, I've lost interest in having a local copy of all the music I can listen to from other sites. Sure, if there's something I really like that I wouldn't want to lose, I'll download a copy, but for the most part I find it much easier to just use Subsonic in the following manner:

I use Chrome for SS browsing. I like the way Chrome displays SS and I like the Shortcut bar at the top. I have my shortcuts set to auto logon to the SS sites I visit. This makes it a snap to change from one site to another with a simple mouse click. It takes you from site to site in under a second, just like clicking to any webpage.

http://Servername.Subsonic.org/login.vi ... word=guest

Use a link in the format above to do this. I have 7 sites setup this way and it works great. Sometimes easy answers work the best. YMMV

[Saiboogu]

I'm with you GJ51 -- Why waste space on two copies. But the OP wanted to merge the collections somehow, so there's some options. Ranging from bad to OK.

[GJ51]

I guess I'm just getting old enough to rethink things before I jump into the deep end of the pool. I was reading this artice about this guy's massive media collection at http://www.mediasmartserver.net/ and I couldn't help but think that If you took the money he spent to do this, you could have probably just subscribed to Netflix, had a premium all channel cable subscription, and watched tons of pay per view, and still have enough left over to go to the movies theater whenever you wanted to.

Plus you would have saved all that shelf space!

[dan1son]

There are problems with this approach. Basically anything that's being played from the remote server will need to be sent from the remote server, to the local server (over a VPN, ssh mount, ftp, whatever) and then sent out again (transcoded if needed). So you're sending the file around twice.

If the guy at the remote server wants to listen to his own tunes via the singular subsonic UI, he will be sending the data to that server and streaming it back down just to listen to it, even though it's local.

If one of the parties has very good upload speeds, it might not be an issue, otherwise you'll be at least doubling the amount of used bandwidth.

[robotanalysis]

Probably the easiest/cheapest way to accomplish this:

1. Run Subsonic at all locations.
2. Have each person use Dropbox (or similar service) to sync music collections.
3. Make one of your Subsonic folders the folder that gets synced.