Subsonic and Licensing

Posted on 2015-07-26 by Nick Thomas

Subsonic

Subsonic is a reasonably neat "personal cloud" sort of thing for playing music.

In many ways, it replicates the Owncloud Music application. I'm a fan of that

too, but switched to Subsonic once it became clear that upgrading OC would

always be a trial. Unfortunately, although Subsonic is open-source, it includes

a bunch of money-making "premium" stuff backed by a licensing scheme. This

includes nagware, etc.

Subsonic

Owncloud

With an open-source project, you can just fork it and release a version with all

that crap removed, of course, and that's precisely what

`@EugeneKay` has done:

https://github.com/EugeneKay/subsonic/commit/a08c8a80da07ddfe8d34dada439cc3480ddce725

Do not trust HTTP or DNS

As the patch notes, the licensing scheme is fairly hilariously simple: the

license "key" is just the md5sum of the email address; a remote HTTP server

is looked up over DNS and queried to see if that license is on a central DB and,

if it is, whether it has expired.

So in `/etc/hosts`:

127.0.0.1 subsonic.org

In `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/subsonic.org.conf`:

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        server_name subsonic.org;

        location /backend/validateLicense.view {
                return 200 "true\n2068585481000\n";
        }

        location / {
                proxy_pass http://66.49.215.227;
        }
}

(I've not actually tested the proxy_pass but I imagine it'll work).

Then in the Subsonic licensing box:

Email: foo@example.com
Key:   b48def645758b95537d4424c84d1a9ff

So, no need to maintain a separate fork after all. Beautiful.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

mailto:gemini@ur.gs