Subsonic Forum

Hey all

I've been trying to think of a good way of getting my whole subsonic library in my car without streaming it (don't want to kill my data plan). There are several phone apps that cache folders, but you have to do each album individually, which would take forever to do. Wondering what solutions some of you have if you listen to your subsonic library in the car? Open to other software/options also if you have a solution outside subsonic.

Really, you're asking the impossible, give or take the size of your library (mind you, mine is more than 130,000 tracks across 2 servers, encompassing more than a terabyte of data, but there we are).

If you really want your entire collection on your phone, then just put it there and use a local app, and recreate your playlists as best you can.

Otherwise, you'll have to set no quota, get on a wifi so you're not using up a data plan, have the space ready already, and just "play" every music folder you can from the top and let it cache. but cache data is risky, and the phone could decide to discard it all at any point if it needs the space, something it won't do if your music files are actually pushed to the phone's SD card independently as a file system. Cache algorithms also have threshold limits. They work well for a few thousand, but at a certain point they dramatically flip from being very fast to being painfully slow - this is just the nature of the mathematics, what is an optimization at one level becomes a detriment at another.

You (again, assuming this is an SD card) could just pull the card out, stick it in the desktop computer, and copy everything that way for the regular music player to pick up.

Subsonic is for streaming. If you're not streaming, then best pick a different product.

I'm not sure it's impossible, but it's not simple.
My collection is under about 150GB and I have a phone with plenty of room (256GB) to keep it. I had a 32GB phone prior to this (iphone so there's no SD card slot) and rarely hit the limit with other apps. I try to keep my phone clean.
I've used apps like AVSub and play:Sub that allow you to manually and purposely "cache" music. From what I can tell, what it's doing is downloading the files and storing them locally in a fairly non-volatile way (no need to play them - it downloads them fast). I've cached albums and had them stay on there for a very long time (a year maybe) until I hit the threshold that I set myself, and then the albums were removed to make room for newly "cached" stuff. If you set no limit, AFAIK it's not going to just delete your cache without you removing the app or getting a new phone, in which case I'd have to load the whole collection back on the phone anyway.
I'm willing to hear about other music-in-your-car solutions that are not subsonic if theres a great one out there that works with carplay and has a "shuffle all" feature. I just thought since it seemed very close to possible with some subsonic apps that cache, it would just take forever to manually cache every album. I'm not a fan of the native iTunes.

The Android App allows you to "PIN" selected files, these are then retained on the phone the first time they are downloaded (Play first time on WiFi/Lan) and then are not streamed again, infact to be certain I turn the App "Offline" and then it plays all such retained files quite happily.

Streaming music is typically about 100mb an hour. a 2gb data plan and you can stream about 20 hours give or take. You could reduce usage by going on Wifi whenever possible.

I have a 10gb data plan and never even get close to my limit.

Those are stats for my old app which is being phased out. Muzecast will go away in Sep 2020 so I am trying out SS as an alternative.

WG63 wrote:Those are stats for my old app which is being phased out. Muzecast will go away in Sep 2020 so I am trying out SS as an alternative.

This is exactly the same problem what I have. Muzecast was the only App which could handle my 1TB music-collection on OneDrive. I Already tried PLEX and Emby but both are not usefull for me.
Now I´m on Subsonic and Madsonic but there is no Android App which are up-do-date. I´m not sure if someone will be developed anymore

The thing about updates is, well, the core app and others haven't updated because they're stable. They still work, so what's to change unless you dislike UIs that feel 'stale' because they haven't changed.

I use DSub when I really want Android Auto behavior off my phone. My only gripe there is playlist play only selects 50 files if you do it through AndroidAuto so for a long haul, better to start the playlist in the main mode first before switching to Auto.

SubFire apps are packaged as ProgressiveWebApps, so they can be installed directly from Samsung's browser or Chrome once you visit the page (preferably with a secure server so you can use the secure https app). They are actively maintained, and I'm currently designing and building a new "desktop" playlist editor.