I have been looking for a way to stream music from my Windows Home Server without using some intermediary service for some time now.  Most of the applications require some third party service to stream your media, that is, until I stumbled upon Subsonic.

Subsonic promises to deliver the solution to streaming my music without using any third party service and claims to be an easy to install solution.

Subsonic is a free, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Use it to share your music with friends, or to listen to your own music while at work. You can stream to multiple players simultaneously, for instance to one player in your kitchen and another in your living room.

Subsonic is designed to handle very large music collections (hundreds of gigabytes). Although optimized for MP3 streaming, it works for any audio or video format that can stream over HTTP, for instance AAC and OGG. By using transcoder plug-ins, Subsonic supports on-the-fly conversion and streaming of virtually any audio format, including WMA, FLAC, APE, Musepack, WavPack, Shorten and OptimFROG.

Subsonic website: http://subsonic.sourceforge.net/

Download: http://subsonic.sourceforge.net/download.php

Demo: http://gosubsonic.com/login.view?user=guest2&password=guest

I chose the windows installer, after all; easier is better.

There is basically only one requirement for Subsonic to run properly on your server (Java 6 or later), however, the windows installer will take care of this for you.  The application also installs itself as a service so there are no worries about being logged into your server at all times or using the AnyServiceInstaller to register a service.

The installation is pretty straight forward, guiding you through standard warnings and installation “nexts”