The open source community has lost a great project recently. RIP Subsonic.

[williamkray 1]

I love open source projects, and I use them and support them when I can. It's one of several reasons that I choose Emby over Plex. Recently, another media streaming service that I use, Subsonic, has made a transition from open- to closed-source. I'm sure that there will be forks of the older codebase, and everything in the world will trudge along just as it always has...

 

But this brings me to an interesting point. I was using Emby for video, and Subsonic for music streaming and playlist creation, podcast fetching, etc. and syncing to my phone with DSub (which I still absolutely stand by as a premier music app for Android). Surely not everyone will jump ship from Subsonic, but a few will opt to replace it with an open-source alternative, and Emby could be a winning combo. However, its music features definitely still feel secondary to the video features.

 

With Subsonic creating a vacuum in the music streaming space, I hereby suggest/request that Emby focus development on its music features, and even better, include Subsonic-compatible API calls so that Subsonic apps would work with Emby music streaming. When I say music features, primarily I'm hoping for m3u or similar playlist import/export, but also being optimized for handling large libraries, smart radio stations based on artist a la Spotify/Pandora, scrobbling to Last.fm because I guess that's a thing that people care about still... stuff like that. Essentially all the features that made Subsonic the go-to choice for so long.

 

There are plenty of wishlist items for Emby's roadmap that everyone is hoping or waiting for (I won't list them here because that defeats my point). But I think that by really pushing music features that bring Emby on par with Subsonic, it could absolutely be a home-run, even without some of the other more clamored-for features. Rather than thinking "Oh you should use Emby for video, but use Ampache for music", Emby could potentially take the top spot for both use cases.

 

This is turning into more of a plea combined with a fantasy. I'm sorry. But I would be curious to hear what you dev folks think about the future of Emby, if you've heard at all about the Subsonic news, and how these ideas might influence this project? Perhaps I'm off my rocker and there are already all these features by simply installing some plugins? I dunno. Comments welcome.

[Luke 37269]

Hi, welcome. There could be any number of reasons why they may have done that. Perhaps they struck a deal for access to premium content, who knows. The big question though is what are the motives for your desire for open source. Are you interested in participating and joining the community in order to help the software grow, or is your desire for open source coupled with an expectation of free? Although we are open source, Emby would not be able to survive and compete if everything were free. That's just reality.

 

Your feature requests are all good ideas. We do have an instant mix feature which is similar to radio stations, except you can't save them to a home screen for quick access. Also, there is a community member working on a last fm scrobbling plugin.

[williamkray 1]

Free very often goes hand in hand, but I'm happily paying for a subscription to Emby because it's a great product and I want to continue tp contribute regularly rather than just a one-and-done payment. I simply value the fact that open-source is a priority with the project. I paid for my Subsonic license long ago because it was (and still is) a great product, but I simply don't want to continue to sing its praises if it's changing tack to become something that I know it doesn't need to be.

 

The official reasons are that the developer is starting to use some licensed software for some of his playback or encoding features or something, and he apparently has hardcoded his licenses into the code, which he says shouldn't be in the open source code. This is of course terrible practice, and a dumb excuse. I can't imagine that this is truly his reasoning.

 

I'm glad you think my ideas are good, rather than just another person spouting nonsense (I know there's always a lot of that). I'll have to play with the instant mix feature. I honestly don't care about the last.fm integration, but I know a lot of people do. I never really understood what the point was.

 

I would love to help with the project, but I don't have the time or expertise (I know ruby, python, bash, etc. but I'm definitely not a ... mono? .NET? developer... I don't even really know what to call it because that's how in the dark I am about it). I'm sure I could pick it up, but to get good enough to really contribute in a meaningful way would take more time than I have available to me, unfortunately. Perhaps if my job gets less busy

 

If you have a published roadmap or trello board or something, let me know where it is and maybe I can pick up some small projects/fixes!

[Luke 37269]

Our github issues list is a great place to start:

 

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/issues

 

You can see we've marked some as up for grabs. Everything on that list is something that is on our roadmap.

[williamkray 1]

nice! now i'll have a use-case to learn some mono! thanks!