Do you dream of starting a Last.fm type streaming music service but from your PC on your room? Maybe not for the entire world but just for you and your friends. And if the nasty business of setting up a server and meddling with Apache files is keeping you back, try the open source Sockso – the zero configuration, “eat straight from the packet” type of music server software.
Some time back I showed you a way to stream music from your home computer to anyone on the Internet using a software called AjaxAMP. AjaxAMP was limited – gave you no control on who will be using it and can only be used with Winamp. Sockso is a much better music server software giving you finer controls on users, better features as a service and can be accessed from a browser as well as from any music player like Winamp, iTunes, WMP etc.
Sockso requires no installation. Simply unzip the package and double click on “Run Sockso”.
The various sections on this program is almost self-explanatory. To add music to the library, go to the Collection tab; to create playlists click on the Music tab; to create users click on the User tab and add user account for each users who would stream music from your server.
Here are a few things you should know about user control. Sockso allows various ways to configure the way you want your users to access the music server. If you want to restrict access to only users you know, click on the Users tab and create a user account for each users. Then check the boxes Enable logging and Disable registering. This will force users to login using the usernames and password you provide and no new users can register for your service.
If you want to allow anyone to access your server but would like to keep track on users, check the box Enable logging but uncheck Disable registering. This will allow new users to access your server by registering themselves.
On the other hand, if you want everything to be open, uncheck Enable logging. You can allow or disallow registering, it doesn’t matter.
Other settings like changing port numbers, allowing/disallowing song downloads, allowing uploads, logging etc can be accessed from the General tab.
To access the music server, all you have to do is point your browser to the link displayed at the bottom of Sockso’s window. Your IP address followed by the port number to connect to.
After logging in (if the option is enabled) it shows you the most played tracks, recent tracks and provides an ability to browse the entire collection by folders or alphabet. Songs can be played either using a pop-up flash player, an embedded player, a Javascript player or even in a standalone media player. Users can create their own playlist and share them with others. Almost everything you would want in a streaming service is there in Sockso.
This page can be replaced with your own by editing the stylesheet inside \sockso-1.1.7\resources\htdocs\skins
The features available to the end users are great and the control given to the owner is more than adequate to run a full fledged music server on your computer. If you are really planning to set up such a music server, this is the one for you.
Stumbled across this... I had no idea this existed. I've been using Orb for everything but this seems far better!
ReplyDeleteHow does it do for large libraries? Does it eat up any CPU usage? (Even ona quad core, Orb will eat up 100% usage when rescanning folders/adding new music)
Thanks for the post!
Thanks for the post, don't know what happen to my old pc if I tried this tool but it's a nice idea. After upgrade my pc, I should try.
ReplyDeleteJust threw a wagonload of 30GB MP3's at it.. no problem! It went indexing for an hour or so and that's it. during the indexing you can continue to use it. CPU (old Core2Duo) was at 30-50%. So yes, it can easily handle large libraries. :-)
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