Spoken Like a Geek - The technology blog of Neil Thompson

Subsonic vs. Spotify

I wrote in my previous post about the really rather wonderful Subsonic and how it was part of my armoury in the battle to rid myself of iTunes. Well I discovered today that it is rapidly becoming a complete replacement for Spotify too.

In my short(ish) life I have seen a number of changes in the music world as it transitioned from records to cassettes to CDs and lately to MP3s. Now there is a new revolution in town – streaming. Up to now you have always owned what you played, or perhaps to be more strictly accurate, you have always had to have had the physical music to play it, whether it was something you could hold or a digital file held on your music player.

In comes streaming and no longer do you own what you play. Instead you pay for the right to play a track from a library larger than you could ever hope to own yourself. The problem is that this library holds may tracks that you already own and plenty more that you have no interest in and you need to pay a tenner a month for the privilege.

Subsonic solves this issue for me in that it has all the advantages of Spotify in that I can steam my music collection to any browser in the world and to my iPhone using iSub. True, I only have access to the tracks that I own but with over 14,000 tracks I am not short of things I want to listen to. Oh, and it is free.