Almost four years ago, I wrote about evaluating some upnp media servers. That time, I ended up settling on J. River Media Center. Honestly, I can’t remember how long that lasted. I do know I went back to using smb with the archos though.
More recently, I’ve been using smb occasionally to play music hosted on my media drive using my wifi bluray player.
Getting the kobo vox has really made me take another look at this. I was thinking this could finally be the remote client device that also gives me last.fm integration when playing music. It took me a while to figure out how exactly, but I think I’ve hit on a working solution. Here are the steps (and dead-ends I went through):
Scrobbledroid: First, I grabbed this android app which allows scrobbling from the default android music player. It seemed to work fine but the mp3 files needed to be on the vox’s storage so…
ES File Explorer: This file manager for android offers various network features including smb browsing. I thought maybe I could use it to launch the mp3s in the music player. That sort of worked but the music player didn’t bother to read the id3 tags when opened that way so could not submit to last.fm.
Other Media Players: I tried out a number of other media players hoping they could be launched via ES File Explorer, read the id3 tags and submit to last.fm. No such luck.
CifsManager: I found a pointer to this app which looked really promising. It allows you to mount a network drive, thus tricking the device into seeing the remote files as local. If this worked, I could just let the default music player index my remote files and scrobble them when played. Sadly, apparently the vox’s kernel does not include CIFS support. 
Gmote: This looked pretty promising too. It’s a client/server app. You run a server on your pc and access it with the android client. Its original chief purpose was to control media playing on your pc from android (thus the name) but it has a newer feature that lets you stream mp3s from the pc to your android which was exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, although I could browse my collection with the android app, for some reason the streaming simply did not work for me.
Vibe Streamer: This product is a dedicated mp3 server. It uses a web-based, flash client. Although I could load the client in opera mobile on the vox, I could not make it actually do anything.
Audiogalaxy: Here’s a blast from the past. AG was my favourite p2p service back in the post-Napster days. The thing I think they did that was really interesting was their search interface was just their website and then when you went to download something, it got passed off to a small client app which handled that part of it. This was in contrast to most p2p apps which were big, clunky all-in-one messes. You’ll note that emusic later appropriated this template as does bittorrent.
Now, AG has re-made themselves as a cloud music outfit. I have to say, they’ve done a pretty good job of it. I actually ended up using this for a couple days and thought it was going to be the “final solution” in this post.
How it works is you set up their server software on your pc. It indexes your music. Then you visit their website and play your music remotely through it. Or on their android app.
However, the thing that bugged me about this setup was that I planned to primarily listen to music at home and the way it worked was each song would get uploaded from my pc to their server and then transcoded at a lower bitrate and streamed down. It just seemed horribly inefficient even though it worked pretty well. I really wanted something that could work locally…
Subsonic: So for now, this is what I’ve settled on. This is a really impressive program. Again, you install a server on your pc. But you are accessing it directly whether locally or over the internet. It provides a nice web interface which uses my old favourite JW Player as the actual player. And there’s also a nice android app. And, of course, last.fm support (to be fair, each of the previous 3 programs also offered that).
I only really have two complaints about subsonic:
- I’m experiencing a bug in the android app which was supposedly already fixed which leads me to believe I’m stuck with it where the first song in a playlist always plays partway through before skipping back to the beginning. From then on, everything is fine.
- No replaygain support. On the web side, this would need to be done by the JW Player people which doesn’t look too likely. Not sure what it would take to get it in the android app but again, it doesn’t look like a high priority to me. Too bad.
Still, a great product and I’ve been enjoying listening both via the vox at home and via the web interface at work. Neat to have remote access to (most of) my music.
Here are a few screenshots, first from the web interface, the size of the collection:
And a few screens from the android app and finally, the home screen widget it provides:
