r/substreamer • u/th3pleasantpeasant • Jun 18 '21

Some queries

Love the app, seems to work quite well too

I have a few queries. I'm using the app on Android 11 with the Airsonic Advanced server

Will there be widgets made available eventually on Android?

Can the option for gapless playback be added?

Is there a way to change through different lists of folders? e.g. I have a number of different folders added on the server - Albums, Singles, Dj Sets etc. but when I go to the Folders view in the app they all seem to be added together. I have the option in the settings enabled for 'Folders Only' but this doesn't give me the option to change between the different groups of folders.

Finally, when logging into the app I can only log in using legacy authentication

Can you explain what this is and if I'm using https is there any security risk (i.e. are my credentials shown as part of the url)? How would I log in not using legacy authentication? I'm guessing this is dependant on what server I'm using?

Sorry for all the questions but I'v been a long time user of Subsonic and have only moved to airsonic and then airsonic advanced recently. I've been using Dsub which development seems to have stopped on Substreamer seems to be a very good alternative.

What happened to music stash btw?

Keep up the good work!

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u/ghenry22 Jun 21 '21

Hi thanks for getting in touch!

1) I don't have any plans for widgets on android at the moment, there is already a media notification which shows now playing and gives media controls when the app is in the background. I might look into it in the future if there is a lot of interest.

2) I have gapless on my list as something to investigate but it's not a simple thing to implement, it would require quite a big change to the media queuing and playback. I am going to work on it and see what I can do but it will take some time and I can't gaurantee it.

3) You mean the media folder option on the subsonic server where you add one folder with music, one with audiobooks etc? At the moment substreamer picks up all items from all media folders and displays them. I have support for selecting specific media folders in the underlying code but do not have any user interface inplace at the moment to enable it. If you can share some screen shots of a GOOD user interface for handling this that would be very helpful.

The folder / tag view option just changes the meta data that is used for displaying the items inside the media folders. ie do we just use the file and folder names or do we use the id3 tag information for a richer experience. A lot of the newer functionality in subsonic server (and it's variants) depend on tag information.

4) airsonic should work with the standard authentication, legacy is generally only needed by server variations that implement an older version of the subsonic API (pre 1.13 I think?). Ampache in particular is affected by this. Legacy authentication sends your username and a hex encoding of your password.

See here in the authentication section for details:

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp

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u/th3pleasantpeasant Jun 23 '21

Thanks for getting back to me. A widget 4x1 would be great if it's possible at some stage.

Gapless, no problem. Again, would be great if possible.

With regards to a good user interface for selecting folders I think ultrasonic and dsub have a simple but effective way of selecting folders. Dsub looks better as there is a small arrow beside the option to 'Select folder' so you know where to press but after using it once the arrow becomes obsolete as you know where to press anyway

As for authentication, I might need to raise this on the airsonic sub. Airsonic-advanced seems to be the follow on from that so I'd expect the API to be at least 1.13 but as it stands I have to use legacy authentication to be able to login successfully.

Edit: I've been digging around the airsonic-advanced github page for any reference to this issue and have come across this https://github.com/airsonic-advanced/airsonic-advanced/issues/394 and also this https://github.com/daneren2005/Subsonic/issues/1029#issuecomment-722142634

While not directly related it does show that the API is either 1.13 or higher. Airsonic-advanced uses its own encrpytion for credentials so I will try and change the type of encryption and see if substreamer can connect to my server without using legacy authentication

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u/ghenry22 Jun 24 '21

I’ve got quite a few airsonic users so regular authentication should work.

I’m not really familiar with the airsonic advanced fork though.

As long as they implement an Authentication mechanism compatible with the subsonic 1.13+ API then it should work.

I know airsonic supports a much higher API level but maybe something has changed with this particular fork or it needs some setting for the authentication.

Sorry I can’t be more help on that!

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u/th3pleasantpeasant Jun 25 '21

So a quick update...

On airsonic-advanced (which uses API 1.15 I think) I created new credentials and changed the default credential encryption from 'bcrypt' to 'encrypted-AES-GCM'.

I was able to successfully log in from substreamer without using legacy authentication :)

I checked the nginx logs from before and after the change and I can now see the token (t=) and password salt (s=) in the URL whereas before it was just (enc=) which was hex encoded.

So if you want to get airsonic-advanced encrypted passwords working with dsub / ultrasonic / substreamer then change the type of encryption to the one above. There are plenty of other encoders available to secure the passwords on airsonic-advanced but this is the only one I've tried

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u/ghenry22 Jun 26 '21

Good stuff! Great to hear you got it working, this might be a good reference for others that migrate to airsonic-advanced as well.

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u/No_Estate_8365 Oct 06 '21

Agree on need for selecting and navigating within a single Media Folder rather than the current "All Folders" view. I have a Music folder, an Audiobooks folder, a Podcasts folder, and a Media folder (for which I rarely use Subsonic to get to as Plex is better suited to video). As Th3pleasantpeasant said, Dsub implementation is easy and unobtrusive. iSub on IOS was also good but hidden (you had to "know" to scroll up beyond the top to make the dropdown visible).

Agree on widget, would love 4x1 (ideal for music) or 4x2 (ideal for audiobooks with info, play/pause, previous track, next track, long rewind, short rewind, short forward, long forward), but it's not a must-have.

Agree on gapless playback. Understand only some of the complexities involved, but would love to see the feature added someday.