---
title: "Subsonic and Licensing"
---

## 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.

=> http://subsonic.org Subsonic
=> http://owncloud.org 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.
