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I’ve been a computer user for most of my life. Being born in the latter half of the 80’s, that is to be expected. The computer was solely for entertainment, and for playing games in particular. In the late 90’s, we got access to broadband Internet, we had dial-up for years before but, due to the cost, I rarely got to use it (and, when I did, I used it to look up gaming guides and cheats). Broadband access changed how I used the computer drastically, napster helped with that too. I didn’t care that my computer was too slow to run the newest games any more (I bought a video game console to satisfy my gaming needs), because I could explore this whole other world and interact with people in a way that wasn’t possible for me before. I was still using Windows however – it took me a long time to get rid of it actually. I’ve been running Linux-based operating systems for two years now, and I don’t see myself ever going back.
In 2010 I fell in love. I fell in love with the demo scene, and more specifically the synth and tracker driven music. I had occasionally stumbled across a demo or two, cracktros and so forth, but I never thought much about it. Music has always been a big part of my life, and I do consider myself as someone who doesn't care about the genres as long as it sounds great (you’ll probably argue with me about that if you have a look at my collection, though). In the early years of high school, I was very into metal, and I thought that Iron Maiden was the greatest, but, as I matured, so did my musical taste. One day I found this album called First and Last and Always. I thought the first few tracks were ok, then track #5, Marian, begun playing and completely blew me away. I still refer to The Sisters of Mercy as my favourite band.
But something else also happened in 2010. One of my hard drives gave up, and with it went my music collection. On the bright side, I finally decided that I was done with Windows and I’ve been running Linux ever since. I stuck with Ubuntu until 11.10, I thought Unity was awful and switched to mint 12, and now I’m running mint 13 64-bit MATE on both my desktop and laptop.
So what does Linux, the demo scene, and music have in common? For me it’s Subsonic. When I lost my music collection (except for the Sisters of Mercy albums which I actually own), I started downloading all the amazing free demo scene music, and it soon led me into the wonderful world of net-labels. To this day, I still can’t believe how much incredible brilliant and wonderful music there’s out on the Internet, for free! This is where Subsonic comes in. As my music collection grew exponentially in size, and the wide range of different audio formats made it impossible to carry with me everywhere, I had to find a solution. With Subsonic, it doesn’t matter if the file is an .xm .mp3 .flac or .aac – it’ll transcode (into a bit-rate of my choosing) it all into something that my Android device can play when I’m out and about. When I’m at home, I use the web interface to access all my music, I have not yet been able to get the right equipment to set something up for the jukebox function. Which means that the computer running the Subsonic server is outputting the music through its audio ports and the playlists are controlled by an external player.
Subsonic is free, but with additional features unlocked if you donate, such as being able to play your files on an Android device, and video support. The installation process is pretty straightforward, it’s distributed in a .deb package, and that makes it easy to install. And, if you need additional help, then take a look at the forums, a lot of great tutorials there.
Installing Subsonic as a linux newbie taught me a lot. The first few weeks of using Ubuntu, I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it, I felt as if everything I did could be done just as easily (and in some cases easier) in a Windows environment, and the terminal scared me. I had picked up some basic terminal commands back in school (cd .., ls, cat, nano, man, etc), and little by little I began exploring and tweaking config files to my liking. My current Subsonic server is running on Ubuntu Server 12.04, a couple of old hard drives in an old computer running in RAID 5. I have sshfs (SSH Filesystem) running on it, so I can use it as my own personal cloud storage, and adding more music is a breeze.
So, what do I want to say with all of this? If you’re having trouble getting into Ubuntu (or Linux in general), think about what really drives you, what’s your passion? Chances are someone has written neat software that will make your life – and the exercising of that passion – a lot easier. Don’t be afraid to use Google or the man command, they’ll be your best friends. Be prepared to read a lot, most guides I’ve come across have a good description of what every single command and parameter does when they’re executed, that’s how you’ll learn.