What is your Subsonic setup?

[wiobyrne]

Hi all,

Wondering what your Subsonic setup is...mostly trying to tweak my setup for all it has to offer. I currently have a shade under 300 GB of music, comedy, and audiobooks organized by artist/album/tracks...and it's all running on my Ubuntu 11.04 box. I have about a half-dozen people sharing, streaming, and uploading music..along with a guest account. We also each have our iPhones, Android phones, tablets, etc. streaming to wherever we are located.

Everything runs great, but I keep trying to see if I can tweak my setup to make the experience a bit better for all of us. Playlists seem to help negotiate the massive collection, but it still is overwhelming. Is there a way to sort by genre in my collection without reorganizing the entire collection? Additionally, the iSub app has a beautiful feature that will allow to sort by genre, album, etc...is that function ever coming up in the Android version.

All in all...love my Subsonic setup. How about you...what have you done?

[thilak]

It is a nice sharing..........

[GJ51]

I've made some progress ...

[kosmos]

First post on the forum too, so I figured this is a good place to start.

I have a Dell Poweredge 2850 with 2x Intel Quad Core Hyperthreaded CPU's, 1TB RAID 5 Array and 16GB RAM running Windows Server 2008 x64 R2.

This is one of two servers (of the same spec) that I have in my house and I use this one for managing my music collection, I have a static public IP address with a domain registration so that I can get to my music when I'm out and about. I use iSub on my iOs devices when I'm out of the house, but I have a few laptop computers tucked away in various rooms in my house which I use to access my media on my server.

It's a pretty good setup and Subsonic is the icing on my media cake.

[wiobyrne]

@GJ51, I like how you've bundled it for what looks like potential clients to use in housing their own media. I'm interested in your inclusion of video. I recently added a TB drive to my setup, and have dumped my music into that. I toyed with the idea of either housing a collection of movies, or TV shows...one of the sharers on my system wants to start up a music video collection. My thinking is that there's a good collection of movies I could watch again and again...but TV shows or music videos...I think would get tiring.

I have added more, and more music...and with a collection of audiobooks, and comedy recordings (audio)..it's starting to fill up quickly.

@kosmos...thanks for sharing. In upgrading the system, I have been considering adding a couple TB drives and setting up a RAID server...but I wanted to just get this thing back up and running. Next upgrade will most likely be maxing out the storage space, and improving the nuts and bolts of the computer as I use it to watch movies while connected to the HDTV.

-Ian

[djetch]

My setup:

Self made box:

AMD Phenom II x4 920 Processor 2.80GHz
4GB RAM
64-bit Win7
1 TB internal (main drive for music for no lag)
6 TB RAID 6 in a Drobo via Firewire 800 (backup for music; primary for other media)

The box also serves as my HTPC for my movie and TV show collection. Nothing to big but it gets the job done.

[GJ51]

@GJ51, I like how you've bundled it for what looks like potential clients to use in housing their own media. I'm interested in your inclusion of video. I recently added a TB drive to my setup, and have dumped my music into that. I toyed with the idea of either housing a collection of movies, or TV shows...one of the sharers on my system wants to start up a music video collection. My thinking is that there's a good collection of movies I could watch again and again...but TV shows or music videos...I think would get tiring.

I have added more, and more music...and with a collection of audiobooks, and comedy recordings (audio)..it's starting to fill up quickly.

@kosmos...thanks for sharing. In upgrading the system, I have been considering adding a couple TB drives and setting up a RAID server...but I wanted to just get this thing back up and running. Next upgrade will most likely be maxing out the storage space, and improving the nuts and bolts of the computer as I use it to watch movies while connected to the HDTV.

-Ian

I think http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152245

is the best bang for the buck for storge right now. 2TB for $80 is $40/TB. 3TB dirves will run about at least $60/TB and 1TB drives are around $55/TB.

I have several of these drives and they run cool and quiet and have avg tranfer rate of 85 mb/sec.

I also use a Ceton tuner card connected to FIOS HDTV to capture TV. It has 4 tuners so you can record 3 and watch one at the same time. With premium subscriptions to HBO/Cinemax etc. you can grab the movies you want with no commercials.

Next I'll be adding a Silicon Dust HD Prime digital cable tuner that will have 3 tuners that are pooled for network access so that any PC in the house can have access to live TV. They could also record from the network tuner and of course any recorded TV can then be transferred to one of our servers for archive storage.

My next long term project will be an in house SAN to provide high speed data storage to the whole network and start consolidateing all the data into a secure RAID setup to prevent data loss due to hardware failure, I'm thinking RAID 60 - 24 3 TB drives. Maybe when the kids are done with college.

[kosmos]

I think http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152245

is the best bang for the buck for storge right now. 2TB for $80 is $40/TB. 3TB dirves will run about at least $60/TB and 1TB drives are around $55/TB.

I have several of these drives and they run cool and quiet and have avg tranfer rate of 85 mb/sec.

I also use a Ceton tuner card connected to FIOS HDTV to capture TV. It has 4 tuners so you can record 3 and watch one at the same time. With premium subscriptions to HBO/Cinemax etc. you can grab the movies you want with no commercials.

Next I'll be adding a Silicon Dust HD Prime digital cable tuner that will have 3 tuners that are pooled for network access so that any PC in the house can have access to live TV. They could also record from the network tuner and of course any recorded TV can then be transferred to one of our servers for archive storage.

My next long term project will be an in house SAN to provide high speed data storage to the whole network and start consolidateing all the data into a secure RAID setup to prevent data loss due to hardware failure, I'm thinking RAID 60 - 24 3 TB drives. Maybe when the kids are done with college.

Hi GJ51 that's going to be a very nice setup. A friend of mine has a 48TB NetAPP SAN complete with fibre switch/fabric. It is an awesome setup that cost him a fortune and despite the fact that he had the finances to build this kind of installation at home, he is rather sick of the very large power bills hehe..

[John Redcorn]

I'm running a dedicated-to-subsonic vboxheadless 384mb ram fedora 15 vm, all my media is stored on my windows machine, win shares are mounted with fstab in the vm.

This 384mb vm is hosted on a 2.8ghz P4 with 2gb ram, Fedora 15 as the host os too.

Low-Low-spec but it will transcode 1080p all day long without a problem.

I've setup tomato QOS to make anything from that vm high priority, I can run torrents on other machines saturating my 2mbit uplink and as soon as I start streaming from subsonic the qos steps on those torrents just enough that I can play video at up to 1000kbit/s with no stutters.

[wiobyrne]

Thanks for the insight all. I think I might be figuring out how to load a couple of those 2 TB drives into my Ubuntu box to handle some video...more music...and thinking about running my own Dropbox backup for all my computers.

Thanks for the link from NewEgg...that blows away the drive I bought from Best Buy.

What mods are you all currently running with SubSonic? I would love to have the ability to sort by genre from the browser to help make sense of the large music collection I've been building. I even like the way that iSub on the iPhone will sort by genre...is there any way to get this functionality on the browser...or even android?

That being said...what mods...if any are you all using?

@GJ51...I think I need to make a pilgrimage to Western NY to figure out how I'm supposed to set this computer up.

[GJ51]

I'm running a dedicated-to-subsonic vboxheadless 384mb ram fedora 15 vm, all my media is stored on my windows machine, win shares are mounted with fstab in the vm.

This 384mb vm is hosted on a 2.8ghz P4 with 2gb ram, Fedora 15 as the host os too.

Low-Low-spec but it will transcode 1080p all day long without a problem.

I've setup tomato QOS to make anything from that vm high priority, I can run torrents on other machines saturating my 2mbit uplink and as soon as I start streaming from subsonic the qos steps on those torrents just enough that I can play video at up to 1000kbit/s with no stutters.

Very impressive with the hardware you're running. Any tweaking/setup advice for the peanut gallery?

Many users complain about buffering of hi res video. My systems run ok, but I'm running quad core cpu's and have an ffmpeg build that seems to be utilizing the cpu much better than the version distributed with Subsonic. I'm sure everyone would be interested what, if anything, you did after the standard installation , to improve the video performance.

Thanks

[GJ51]

Thanks for the insight all. I think I might be figuring out how to load a couple of those 2 TB drives into my Ubuntu box to handle some video...more music...and thinking about running my own Dropbox backup for all my computers.

Thanks for the link from NewEgg...that blows away the drive I bought from Best Buy.

What mods are you all currently running with SubSonic? I would love to have the ability to sort by genre from the browser to help make sense of the large music collection I've been building. I even like the way that iSub on the iPhone will sort by genre...is there any way to get this functionality on the browser...or even android?

That being said...what mods...if any are you all using?

@GJ51...I think I need to make a pilgrimage to Western NY to figure out how I'm supposed to set this computer up.

With the current structure of Subsonic and the way it handles folders and files, I would use seperate folders for different genres if that was important to me. That way you could just use the drop down selector to browse the different genres or select all folders to see the entire library.

I am a pretty big Newegg fanboy, as they have consistently competitive pricing, often have free shipping, and have excellent customer support and return policies. A couple years ago I ordered a 54" Plasma for Chrismas and stored it in a neighbor's garage until Xmas to surprise the kids. On Xmas day we carried it over to our house, put it in the family room and opened the bopx to findthat the screen had shattered in shipping. The truck driver explained that this happens frequently when they get shipped by plane due to air pressure changes. I was supposed to open and inspect the box within 48 hours to report any damage. I called Newegg and explained that I had stored the box when delivered and did not read the notice regarding the 48 hr. reporting. They issued an RMA and a full refund without any hassle.

I've been a loyal customer ever since. Even if something is a few bucks cheaper somewhere else, I'll usually go with the egg knowing that if there's a problem I can always get it resolved without a big hassle.

Visitors are always welcome in WNY.

[John Redcorn]

Very impressive with the hardware you're running. Any tweaking/setup advice for the peanut gallery?

Many users complain about buffering of hi res video. My systems run ok, but I'm running quad core cpu's and have an ffmpeg build that seems to be utilizing the cpu much better than the version distributed with Subsonic. I'm sure everyone would be interested what, if anything, you did after the standard installation , to improve the video performance.

Thanks

I didn't do anything special at all, all stock settings in subsonic except for adding users and music folders. I don't know about other linux vers of subsonic, but mine didn't come with ffmpeg and other transcoders, I installed those first from repository.

Fedora was installed with the "web server" install option and I unchecked all X/gui options on install.

[Hellscream]

HEYA ALL

My setup:
Intel I7 950 3.2GHz
4 GB DDR III Patriot PGV34G2000ELK memory
Asus Rampage III extreme motherboard
Seagate NCQ 32MB cache 1TB + seagate 500MB 16MB cache SATA II HDD's
ATI HD 5870 1BG GDDR 5 PCIE 16x

Windows 7 x64
SS 4.4 with tons of customisation check it out
http://hellscream.subsonic.org

[wiobyrne]

It's really interesting to take a peek into everyone else's set up to see what they've done.

@GJ51...I've been seriously thinking lately about shutting down my Ubuntu box for a week and maxing out everything ever since you told me about the drives on New Egg. That coupled with my desire to buy a new flat screen for the house and I think I need to start saving up. I've always been leery of buying large items online due to the issues if something isn't totally right...but the latest Consumer Reports, and your testimonial are making me think otherwise.

@Hellscream...I like the accordion filters you have on the left of the screen. I was checking these out this morning and seriously considering it to help navigate my large collection. I also like the set-up for incoming music folder, and the names of members of your community. What functionality does this offer you? I have about 4-5 people that regularly upload music, and the first couple of times was a pain helping them understand the process.

I also like the other mods, including the maps, but not sure if I want to add them all.

-Ian