Subsonic for a public library

[jeffikonian]

I'd like to rip all 2000 or so of my library's music CDs to MP3 and use Subsonic to stream them to my library patrons. Is that a good and appropriate use of Subsonic?

What are the system requirements for a Subsonic server (on Windows)?

I'm on a 25/15 FiOS line that also serves my library catalog to the public. Will there be sufficient bandwidth to host Subsonic here, or would remote hosting be a better option?

How many simultaneous streams can subsonic support (there have been around 5,500 active patrons in the last year; that's probably a good thumbnail estimate of my potential audience)?

[Archeree]

I'd like to rip all 2000 or so of my library's music CDs to MP3 and use Subsonic to stream them to my library patrons. Is that a good and appropriate use of Subsonic?

What are the system requirements for a Subsonic server (on Windows)?

I'm on a 25/15 FiOS line that also serves my library catalog to the public. Will there be sufficient bandwidth to host Subsonic here, or would remote hosting be a better option?

How many simultaneous streams can subsonic support (there have been around 5,500 active patrons in the last year; that's probably a good thumbnail estimate of my potential audience)?

This is very nice post and i like your post.

[crazysam]

Don't know if you're still interested in trying this out. But before I continue I need to give you a few words of warning: If you're distributing copyrighted material without permission of the content publishers, you might be getting yourself in trouble. Within a small group of friends is one thing, but if you provide the content to thousands of people, you should be prepared to deal with lawsuits.

As far as how many streams Subsonic can handle... without taking bandwidth into consideration, it's really dependent on the machine used. If you want to serve over 1000 clients you'll probably need a pretty beefy machine. Something like a 12 core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, massive power supply, etc. Think about it, your server has to decode a file (in the case it's not an mp3), upload it to the client, but most importantly, it has to deal with directory and music requests, send lists of data, process players for each client, read the files from disk, etc.

If you have a beefy machine you could probably serve quite a lot of users at once. Can't really make a ballpark estimate, I just don't know, but if you don't have a super powerful machine you could just install Subsonic in several machines, map the media folders to a Shared directory, and give them all different ports.

It's possible to use Subsonic to provide content to a lot of people, but it's really not designed to act as a public repository of data.