Experiences with Android apps that stream music from a PC: Orb, Subsonic, Audiogalaxy

I've been wanting to use my Android phone (originally a HTC G1, then a Samsung Vibrant, and now a HTC G2) as my primary music devices for some time. I have already bought stereo Bluetooth receivers that I have hooked up to the RCA inputs on the receivers on my home stereos. Streaming music straight to the stereo from my phone is SO much easier than streaming from a PC, or practically any other device, just because the phone is right there in my hand and is easy to control. I have experimented with a variety of apps that stream music, and will probably continue experimenting. In my experience, none of them is quite perfect, in the sense of meeting all of my needs. That said, I thought I would create a post to record notes about my experiences with the apps that I try. I'll update it from time to time.

In this post I talk about my somewhat limited experiences with apps to stream music from a PC.  There are three apps in this space that I hear about most frequently, and have tried out: Orb, Subsonic, and Audiogalaxy.  I  have another post about services like Rhapsody, MOG, and so forth that stream from the cloud.

Orb

Orb streams music and other media from a PC that is set up as server.  The web interface that allows you to access your collection is very feature rich, allowing searches for tracks based on any of the meta data, including tags.  Creation of playlists based on search results is very easy, via drag-and-drop.  So for example I can search for all my classical tracks that I have rated four stars and above, yielding two thousand tracks or so, and then drag and drop the resulting list to create a new playlist.  It can even stream video, so when it is working properly, in principle you can stream home video from your server at home to your handset.  Setup of the server is very straightforward and it seems to have no problem at all working on a machine behind a corporate firewall, or behind a home router, and doesn't require mucking around with port forwarding or opening up ports.  Overall, it is immensely ambitious in terms of its functionality, and if it worked as intended, it would hands down be one of the best apps out there.

In spite of my enthusiasm, I have reservations.  I have been dabbling with Orb for years now, even before an Android app was available, and it has never been glitch-free.  When I tried Orb over the summer, the main problem was simply that the app was not robust or stable.  It was almost impossible to listen to more than a few songs at a time without the music skipping or cutting out completely.  Video streaming worked only occasionally.  Sometimes the app locked up the phone.

I used again for a few weeks and it was working better than it did over the summer.  I have even gone running with it, streaming my exercise playlist over 3G for well over an hour, and it worked fine.  I don't think there has been a new version of the Android app, so perhaps there have been improvements with the server software.  The app generally seems to work well, though sometimes there is more of a lag after making a selection than I would normally like.  The Android app hasn't been updated since mid-2010, however, so I don't know what the future holds for the app.  Orb seems to be putting most of its effort into its Orb device. (Updated 12/31/2010)

There are some other minor annoyances.  I could never get the Orb server to import m3u playlists created by Mediamonkey playlists.  Songs were randomly dropped from the playlist, and no playlist that was imported seemed to end up with more than a few hundred songs.  That is less of an issue now that I have figured out how to combine search in Orb with drag and drop playlist creation to quickly produce very large playlists.  Another oddity is that Orb reads in ratings with one more star for each track than I assigned in Mediamonkey.  Go figure.

Subsonic

The comments about this app looked pretty good, so I decided to give it a try.  In fact, I tried it twice.  I installed once on my office machine and once on my home machine.  The installation and configuration process is not intuitive at all.  After I went through all that, in neither case could I access the server from anywhere else.  I tried paying for the custom URL functionality but that didn't work either.  There seemed to be a lot of stuff about port forwarding or changing ports or opening up ports, but I can't muck around with that at all on my office machine, and I don't feel like messing with that on my home machine.  I want anything I install to be up and running in moments, not hours.

The comments at the Market are extremely positive, so I guess for some people who have the right configuration to begin with, or spend the time to open up or change ports or customize the port forwarding and so forth, it probably works really well.  That said, I don't think I would recommend this for anyone who isn't technically sophisticated, and who doesn't have complete control over their firewall and router settings.

Update (3/18/2011): I tried again with Subsonic, setting up my home machine as a server, and it works pretty well.  I did have to manually set up port forwarding on my router, which wasn't that difficult.  I am pretty impressed with the performance.  It is definitely much less glitchy than Orb.  It is extremely robust.  Sometimes after very extended listening the app simply crashes, but it is easy to restart.  Unlike Audiogalaxy (below) it imports .m3u playlists.  Although I think it seems to choke on very large playlists, i.e. ones with thousands of songs.  Searching my music library works like a charm, and has a nice variety of views.  And it streams video pretty robustly!  So I'm sold on Subsonic now.   I wish I could run it from my office machine, but that isn't Subsonic's fault.  I suppose I could ask tech support at the office to open up one of the ports for my machine on the company firewall, but that isn't worth the effort.

Subsonic's business model is a bit odd.  The app is free, but you have to pay for the server on your PC after the trial period is over.  I guess I would like it to be the other way around, since buying an app is so easy, whereas paying for software on a PC requires me to whip out a credit card and type.  Also, as far as I could tell, you need to make a donation for each PC on which you install the server.  I uninstalled from my office machine and installed on my home machine and it looked like if I wanted to continue with the added functionality after the trial period was up, I would need to make another donation.

Audiogalaxy

I tried this out.  Installation was easy, even on an office machine behind a firewall, and it seemed to work as promised.  The app was definitely very robust.  I didn't pursue it, however, since the functionality seemed pretty limited.  For one thing, there was no easy way to import .m3u playlists.  Apparently it is possible to import iTunes playlists, but I don't run iTunes.  More of a problem was that it only allowed browsing by artist and album.  I didn't see any way to browse or search on ratings or other meta information.  Orb has very powerful search on metadata and allows for quick creation of playlists based on the results.  I didn't see anything comparable in Audiogalaxy.  I think Audiogalaxy is the most robust of the three streaming options I have talked about here, but has the least functionality in terms of user interface.