Subsonic Music Streamer

I recently installed Subsonic Music Streamer on my HP MediaSmart Server and so far have been very impressed.

EDIT – Suresh asked an excellent question that I failed to address in my original post, to use Subsonic you will need to have a hosting service such as www.tzo.com. Most hosting services are cheap and come in handy if you are looking to set up your own site, etc… TZO.com offers services from as little as $24.95/year, I was fortunate enough to get the service for free for a year when I purchased my HP MediaSmart Server. A free alternative to using a hosting service/subsonic for accessing your media remotely is Orb. Thanks for the question Suresh!!!

So what is Subsonic?

Subsonic is a free, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Use it to share your music with friends, or to listen to your own music while at work. You can stream to multiple players simultaneously, for instance to one player in your kitchen and another in your living room.

Subsonic is designed to handle very large music collections (hundreds of gigabytes). Although optimized for MP3 streaming, it works for any audio or video format that can stream over HTTP, for instance AAC and OGG. By using transcoder plug-ins, Subsonic supports on-the-fly conversion and streaming of virtually any audio format, including WMA, FLAC, APE, Musepack, WavPack, Shorten and OptimFROG.

If you have constrained bandwidth, you may set an upper limit for the bitrate of the music streams. Subsonic will then automatically resample the music to a suitable bitrate.
In addition to being a streaming media server, Subsonic works very well as a local jukebox. The intuitive web interface, as well as search and index facilities, are optimized for efficient browsing through large media libraries. Subsonic also comes with an integrated Podcast receiver, with many of the same features as you find in iTunes.

Based on Java technology, Subsonic runs on most platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix variants.

Subsonic is open-source software licensed under GPL.

I would highly recommend anyone who is looking to remotely access their music library to give this a shot. The program is free, but as always donations are appreciated by the author. Below is a screenshot taken from my music library.

References:
Subsonic Website here.
Setup Guide here.
Forum Discussion at MediaSmartServer.net here. Thanks to user Pibe38 for bringing this great app to my attention