How can I stream Music from my home machine to mobile devices?

Question

I currently have ubuntu 10.04 (planning on upgrading soon to 10.10) on a server at home with a large music and video collection.

I own a blackberry bold 9700 on AT&T and an HTC Desire (Android) on US Cellular, and I'd like to be able to listen to music (and perhaps even watch these videos, although this is less important) easily from both of these phones while on the go.

I've installed subsonic, which is quite nice and does a lot of what I'd like to do, except that using the android app requires paying a license fee that I'd rather avoid by finding a truly free alternative, and simply going through the web interface on either phone's browser is hardly easy or intuitive.

Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated.. hearing from people who have already found working solutions for the bold 9700 would be ideal, as this is my primary phone.

Solution 1

I use Ampache for web-based music streaming. They have clients for Android, iPhone and WebOS; they just added a BlackBerry client. I also believe they have a plugin for Rhythmbox as well. The Ampache website is here: http://ampache.org/

Solution 2

You should check out http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp.

Subsonic is a really great solution for streaming music of most if not all types across the internet. There is also an Android app that will connect to your Subsonic server.

I don't see any Blackberry solution and don't use them anymore but you may be able to set something up.

Comments

[tamale]

I explicitly mentioned that I tried subsonic already..

[tamale]

this looks really nice.. can you point me and other viewers of this question to a how-to for setting this up on ubuntu?

[tamale]

this looks really, really close to what I want. I'll try it out and let you know if it's perfect.. great to see they have a blackberry app.

[nathwill]

i'll second this one. i use Ampache at home to stream music from my NAS to all the local systems (including my Palm Pre via the AmpachPre app), and it works brilliantly, as well as being very easy to set up.

[JanC]

Sorry, I don't know any howto for the whole thing (maybe there is something on the mpd wiki?). And you would need to install & configure both mpd & icecast, so maybe ampache is easier to set up and/or supports more clients.

[jthetzel]

+1 for Ampache. Ampache can also transcode on the fly. So, you can stream lossless FLAC to your home stereo, but downsample to a 128 bit rate mp3 for your mobile.

[Frank H.]

The problem with subsonic and ubuntu is that the package you install runs the application as root, and changing user doesn't work. For that to work, you need to compile it from source, which I wouldn't recmmend. Oh, and even though subsonic is a commercial application (1 dollar per month, I think), they offer absolutely no support whatsoever. So, there has to be better software made by more professional people.