It's easier to setup and manage than other music streaming servers. The latest version of mStream Express doesn't have an dependencies. You can get your server running in 30 seconds since nothing else has to be installed or configured. It also works for Windows, which most servers don't support.

Here's a video of v0.1 of mStream Express being setup in under a minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzuxYTaixpU

Can't you do something similar with plex? I don't remember doing much other than using their installer. Good work though, although I don't listen to much non-streaming (spotify) music lately.

Plex kind of works, but if their central server thinks it's offline for some reason (which happens a LOT), you can't use it, even if you connect directly to it over LAN.

Music support in Plex is rudimentary at best. I have no doubt that MStream is leaps and bounds better.

However, your statement is an `alternative fact` at best, and I am being generous.

Eh? I connect directly to the computers, either from LAN or WAN+port forwarding, and only have an issue if my home connection is having issues.

Hmm weird. I'd be connecting directly to it, as in 192.168.1.10:32400/web and all it would do is redirect to plex.com and then complain that the server is offline. Refreshing a few times would sometimes fix it, but usually not.

Even prior to setting up port forwarding I have never had this issue with Plex :/

I've used Plex for more than five years and that happened like… three or four times. That sounds like a problem in your network setup. You can also always connect directly to it and skip the central server completely. A PMS does not need an internet connection at all.

That's interesting. I have been using Plex for a few years now as my primary media source which means several hours of streaming use daily both at home and travelling and have never had any issue related to the Plex central server being down.

Does it do any encoding to make sure it can play on the client?

No, mStream doesn't support transcoding.

Instead the webapp falls back to using aurora JS for codecs the browser doesn't support. This was mto support flac, but now browsers are starting to add flac support so it's not really that useful anymore

I still love Subsonic. Native clients on mobile devices, web client for browsers. Supports DLNA, videos and playlists. Pretty much ticks all of my personal requirements.

The audio streaming service is a pretty crowded market though. You could ask 10 different people to list their preferred solution and get 10 different answers.

Same. Been using Subsonic for quite a few years now and it works fine for me.

Upvote for subsonic here too, great piece of software been using it years very robust.

.. or Shoutcast / Icecast / etc that we've had since the late 90s

This is different from what Icecast does. Icecast is for the use case where you have a stream of same content for a large amount of listeners, not a different, user-controllable stream for each listener.