Access your Media Library Anywhere
When Spotify first appeared in 2008, it was quite rightly hailed as a revolution. By giving free access to millions of tracks by thousands of artists, the streaming service meant that you could listen to virtually anything you wanted, anytime, anywhere – as long as you had an internet connection, of course.
But the service is far from perfect. The lack of support from many big-name bands is an issue that every Spotify user can identify with, and some of our favourite indie outfits are poorly represented to say the least. And the ads and location-locking of the free account drive us up the wall.
Thankfully, there’s a solution that’s relatively easy, free, and gives you access to your entire library wherever you have a connection: turning your home computer into a music server.
There are a number of programmes available to help you do this, and by using any of them you can be listening to your entire library at work, at a friend’s house, or simply in a separate room of your house from your server.
Sockso is probably the easiest to get to grips with for the less technically inclined: setup is painless, and it only took an hour to catalogue 15,000 tracks. After you’ve got the control panel set up on your server, it’s a simple matter to open the web interface from another computer, smartphone, or even your Wii and start listening via its online Flash music player. The only down side is that Sockso needs a bit of tweaking to play anything other than MP3 files, and the documentation is pretty unhelpful, although this is a problem with 99 per cent of shareware out there.
Zina, from the wonderful folks at pancake.org, offers better file support from the get go, and can be integrated with Last.fm so workplace plays will be scrobbled automatically. It can run on its own, embeded into a website, or as a Drupal module, Wordpress plug-in, Joomla component and module, or Xoops module. Like Sockso, Zina will work on most operating systems, including Linux. However, Zina needs you to have PHP 5.2 installed and to get the most from the application it does help to have a reasonable level of technical savvy. Once you get it working, though, playback is a doddle and the playlist options are as good as you’ll find on any media player.
The last programme we looked at is Jinzora, another PHP-based media streamer that can handle all major audio formats, and can also handle video streaming. Again, you’ll have to have PHP on your computer before using Jinzora, requiring a small degree of tech know-how. But you’ll find that Jinzora is possibly the most fully-featured of the three programmes, and the current 2.8 version seems to be a very stable build. Jinzora can also be used to control hardware such as a Squeezebox or other media streamers around your house, which we found a lot handier than you’d first think. Having a single ‘control’ browser for your media is something that we now can’t imagine life without.
With no monthly charges, no ads, and the ability to access your entire library, we can recommend any of these three applications without reservation. Sockso is certainly the simplest to get working, Jinzora is the way to go for video streaming, and we love Zina’s range of features and Last.fm integration. If you’re a Spotify user, you really owe it to yourself to check them out.
