New user Installation Experience

[ejsireva]

Hi all,

I'm a new user (Greetings!) and thought it might be useful to share some of my observations on getting subsonic up and running on my system.

First off, let me just say that I found the experience to be less traumatic than I expected, and am loving the opportunity to access my music from anywhere I have internet access. Truly a dream come true for me - was happy to make a donation to the cause.

A note on my level of computer competence: I do a lot of work on computers and have done a fair amount of programming and am not afraid to adjust router and firewall settings, etc. However, I have ZERO experience with JAVA, HTML and/or web page creation/design. In short, if subsonic is to have mass appeal, I'm probably the kind of user the package is designed to help.

Here's a list of things that hung me up a bit during the install (in order of general annoyance level.

1) I followed Shane Monroe's extremely well-done practical installation guide. Local access to the collection was very smooth. To obtain internet access I, of course, needed to allow access through the firewall in my internet security program (Mcafee in my case). While I should have remembered this myself, a mention of this in the guide would have been welcome as there were a considerable number of failed connection attempts before I figured this out. I have subsequently seen a reminder about this in the trouble-shooting section of the getting started page, but since I initially followed the link to the Monroe article, this info should appear here as well.

2) Following installation, I kept getting a "Message from webp..." Error window. I believe this was due to the fact that I didn't have a playlist directory set up on my computer even though a default was defined in setup ("C:\playlist").

3) Some info on how to conduct searches (e.g. lucene search protocols) and a short, general discussion of the indexing procedure (like the fact that you have to index your folders before you can conduct your first search and that the service is set to automatically re-index daily) should be included somewhere.

Other than that, the subsonic install was a joy!

For the program to be maximally useful, I also want to be able to use the iphone isub and desktop subair apps. I realize that these apps are developed independently, but it seems like this is still a useful place to post the issues I ran into installing them.

subair:

1) The app won't play m4a encoded files, have to transcode to mp3 for playback

2) Album field searches do not work (artist and song fields OK).

3) If you hit a column sort on a playlist, you can't go back to original (un-sorted order) without re-loading.

4) On an HD screen. the app is too small (I'm getting old but my eyesight isn't that bad yet).


isub:

Basically OK but populating the song tab takes FOREVER. I have > 60K songs and after a couple of hours only 10K were loaded. There is also some strange issue with the iPhone OS that causes the wireless connection to drop periodically. You have to go to airplane mode and then re-connect to restore wireless (or 3G) functionality. The program author recommends playing music during the process for this reason; however, I still encountered frequent drops and eventually had to give up on this. However, the other aspects of the app have worked very well for me and overall I'm happy.