How to Install Subsonic Media Streamer on Ubuntu Linux

Subsonic is an open-source personal media streamer based on Java. It allows you to stream your media from your computer or server and provide ubiquitous access to your music anywhere over the Internet.

With Subsonic, you can enjoy your music and movies everywhere and share with family and friends with apps available for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Chrome, and many more.

Subsonic is designed to handle large music collections and is optimized for MP3 streaming. It works with any media format that can be streamed over HTTP / HTTPS, including AAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, APE, and more.

For more about Subsonic, please check out its homepage.

When you’re ready, follow the steps below:

Install Java 8

For Subsonic to work, you should have Java installed. To do that, run the commands below.

You can either install Oracle Java 8 standard or get the open-source version of Java. For this post, we’re going to be installing the open-source version of Java.

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre

To validate whether OpenJDK is installed, run the commands below

java -version

You should see the similar text below:

openjdk version "1.8.0_191"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_191-8u191-b12-2ubuntu0.18.04.1-b12)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.191-b12, mixed mode)

After installing OpenJDK 8 above, continue below to install and set up Subsonic.

Download and Configure Subsonic

Now that Java is installed, run the commands below to download the Subsonic .deb file. At the time of this writing, the current version is 6.1.5

Visit the Subsonic download page and see if there are newer versions available. If you see the newer version, replace the version number in the download link below.

cd /tmp
wget https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/subsonic-public/download/subsonic-6.1.5.deb
sudo dpkg -i subsonic-6.1.5.deb

Once Subsonic is installed, you can run the commands below to start and enable Subsonic service to always start up when the server boots up.

sudo systemctl start subsonic
sudo systemctl enable subsonic

To check the service status, run the commands below

systemctl status subsonic

You should see similar lines below:

subsonic.service - LSB: Subsonic daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/subsonic; generated)
   Active: active (running) since Fri 2019-03-15 10:55:27 CDT; 24s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
    Tasks: 34 (limit: 4683)
   CGroup: /system.slice/subsonic.service
           └─5176 java -Xmx150m -Dsubsonic.home=/var/subsonic -Dsubsonic.host=0.0.0.0 -Dsubs

Mar 15 10:55:26 ubuntu1804 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Subsonic daemon.
Mar 15 10:55:27 ubuntu1804 subsonic[5161]: Started Subsonic [PID 5176, /var/subsonic/subsoni
Mar 15 10:55:27 ubuntu1804 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Subsonic daemon.

Finally, open your browser and browse to the server name or IP address followed by port 4040

http://localhost:4040/

You should see the Subsonic login page.

The default username and password are admin. After login, you should go to Settings > Users to change the admin password.

Change user

By default, the Subsonic process is run as the root user. To improve security it is strongly advised that you run it as a dedicated user with less powerful privileges. You can specify this user by setting the SUBSONIC_USER variable in /etc/default/subsonic.

Note that non-root users are by default not allowed to use ports below 1024. Also make sure to grant the user write permissions in the music directories, otherwise changing album art and tags will fail.

Enjoy!

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