(Solved) Give my wife access to my music, but nothing else


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Hopefully I can explain this in a means that everyone can understand this...  I am fairly new to unRAID so I am still learning.  

 

Problem - I want my wife to be able to access my music collection from her cellphone so she can listen to it off-line.  

 

Obstacles - My wife only wants to use her Android cell phone.  Google Play music and Plex Player App do not play nice with her cars Bluetooth.   

 

Infrastructure -

  1. Obviously I have my unRAID server running V 6.3.5.  
  2. I have my Windows Desktop,  but i would prefer that the solution not run on this machine
  3. An Ubuntu VM
  4. Plex with a Plex Pass

 

What I have tried - 

 

I have tried using Plex.  However, with this method There are two problems.  First is the Plex media player doesn't play nice with her car's Bluetooth.  Second, I have not been able to figure out how to move the synced files to a location that her preferred music app Power Amp Can access them.  

 

I looked into Subsonic and Madsonic. but also ran into issues with that for getting files to the phone.  

 

Using ES File Manger Pro on my phone.  This method shows the most promise, with a few flaws for my setup.  All of my shares are visible.  Including the stuff you normally don't want the wife seeing.  I tried setting the shares to private but you can still see them ( I don't want anyone else out side of my windows desktop knowing the folders exist).  When I make them hidden I run into windows authentication problems.  

 

 

The method needs to be simple and low maintenance.  While my wife is smart enough she gets frustrated when things don't work right.     

 

 

 

Edited by Seryth
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I'm not entirely sure what kind of errors you hit with [Sub|Mad]sonic - "issues getting the files to the phone" don't make sense to me.

 

You install one of the servers (I'm actually running the Binhex-Libresonic docker on my server, and I've chosen the UltraSonic app to run on my phone). My phone connects to the Librasonic server where I browse all my music (I also have my TV shows & Movies exposed so my kids can watch from college & whatever post Uncle Sam has sent the eldest to), then it downloads them to my phone & plays them. I get my choice of external SD card or internal memory, but beyond that, it doesn't really matter where on the phone the files are. I can listen using UltraSonic via speaker phone, wired headphone, BlueTooth headphones, and, I'd imagine, your wife could listen with her phone connected to the car. I don't know if she could use the car controls to control UltraSonic, but I got basic play/pause and volume control to work just fine with multiple sets of BT headphones. She could select/create a playlist before setting off for her drive and not fiddle with the settings while driving /soapbox, but guilty as charged :).

 

Using the *sonic server on your unRAID you can create multiple user accounts (I'd recommend strong passwords - this is a firewall hole from the wild into your server, after all), and you create categories of files that the *sonic has access to. You can grant each user access to only certain categories, so, for example, your wife gets "Music", while you also get "TV" and "All Movies", while the young'uns get access to "Kids Movies". (To do the movie split, you'd need to have your files organized on the server in a way that makes the split easy - i.e. different high-level directories.)

 

NB: I chose Binhex's *sonic implementation after feeling that Sindre lost his way a bit with the official Subsonic (I paid for my version years ago), and having some installation/functionality issues with the others (sorry, been long enough I don't recall them all, though I'm sure you could search the forum threads for my posts). I chose the UltraSonic client as the one that seemed to have the fewest connection and playback issues of the multitude of Android *sonic clients. (When out for a run, it sucks to have the music suddenly stop playing for no apparent reason - it's a pain to get it restarted while continuing the run...)

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There's no need to "download the track to the device" the players stream it on demand, just like Pandora or Spotify.

 

To start your configuration testing: While at home with the phone on your WiFi, use a client on the phone (UltraSonic, which I linked, is one of many), point the player config at your unRAID box's static IP and *sonic port. You should be able to login with the *sonic account you created & start browsing your media library within seconds.

 

Once that's working, turn off the phone's WiFi (to force access from outside your home network), set up a port-forward in your router to point the incoming traffic at your unRAID box (IP:Port), reset the phone client media player config to point at your home's external address, then start browsing your music collection from the phone. Hit play, and the streaming automatically begins.

 

You may need to use a free service to set up a domain name for your dynamic IP as provided by your ISP. For example, I use changeIP.com, but there's also DynDNS and many others. The various *sonic servers also seem to have their own sub-domaining available that you can set in your *sonic configuration to give you a nice name to point the phone client to. If you have a static IP address from your ISP, just point your phone at the static IP address in the client software config.

  • Upvote 2
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I would prefer to keep all off this internal to my network.  I guess I need to spend more time in figuring out how to keep my shares private and keep the media share open.

 

I like the concept of this, but I prefer more off line control of the content.  For online streaming I have Plex, but more often than not I need more off-line.

 

Thank you for your help in this.  

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Happy to help.

 

You can use *sonic off-line. You can configure the cache size anywhere from 500MB to several GB on your phone. Queue up a bunch of songs & let it download them all to the phone on its own (you can do this on the home WiFi so it's not using your mobile data), then take the phone with you & play from what you've cached.

 

You do what's best for you.

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I use a Libresonic docker and Dsub app my android devices. I also setup Letsencrypt docker to reverse proxy so it's available outside my network.

My wife uses the Dsub app all the time, working out, streaming to the car radio, casting to various speakers in the house.

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