I have some basic Volumio questions. I currently run Puremusic on an old Mac mini (2009, 8g,240gssd, elcapitan)which is due for replacement. I would prefer a silent setup so am considering a volumio or roon based system with the music library stored on a central computer and perhaps anAllo Usbridge to feed my DDDac1794 via USB
My music is currently stored in an iTunes library on an external drive connected by FireWire to the mini. I have 0 experience with Sparky/Linux etc. My biggest question is how difficult is it to get access to the ITunes library if I trial volumio or roon with an Allo usbridge? Is it possible to do a trial and then revert to Puremusic with my library still functional? I mostly listen to my own music collection, about 1000 cds ripped in AIFF format. I do not want to have to rip that many CDs again...ever!
I know these are basic questions. I am a technical person and comfortable doing all kinds of DIY builds but I am not familiar with streamers or their setup. Perhaps I would be better off with a pre built streamer? I am willing to learn and the USbridge seems like an affordable platform to get started.Any advice greatly appreciated
Regards
Brian
My music is currently stored in an iTunes library on an external drive connected by FireWire to the mini. I have 0 experience with Sparky/Linux etc. My biggest question is how difficult is it to get access to the ITunes library if I trial volumio or roon with an Allo usbridge? Is it possible to do a trial and then revert to Puremusic with my library still functional? I mostly listen to my own music collection, about 1000 cds ripped in AIFF format. I do not want to have to rip that many CDs again...ever!
I know these are basic questions. I am a technical person and comfortable doing all kinds of DIY builds but I am not familiar with streamers or their setup. Perhaps I would be better off with a pre built streamer? I am willing to learn and the USbridge seems like an affordable platform to get started.Any advice greatly appreciated
Regards
Brian
Volumio supports streaming from itunes via airplay - see here
It's fairly easy to install volumio (its free) onto a sdcard and run it on a Raspberry Pi. Your DAC should work by just plugging into the RPi.
Apple don't make it easy to move away from their way of doing things, if possible ripping your CD's into Flac files would have made it easier to move your music library around.
The only cost will be the purchase of the RPi.
It's fairly easy to install volumio (its free) onto a sdcard and run it on a Raspberry Pi. Your DAC should work by just plugging into the RPi.
Apple don't make it easy to move away from their way of doing things, if possible ripping your CD's into Flac files would have made it easier to move your music library around.
The only cost will be the purchase of the RPi.
Roon supports reading iTunes libraries so it should be as easy as connecting your external drive to your new server (or you can even try it out with your old Mac mini) and pointing Roon at the library (Roon Knowledge Base - iTunes).
I don't think Volumio would be able to read the library files but should be able to just point it to the Music directory and it would scan all the files (just like Roon).
So both options are non-destructive and you can always go back to your old setup.
I guess you can try out Roon by just installing the server on your old Mac mini, for Volumio you will need another machine.
I don't think Volumio would be able to read the library files but should be able to just point it to the Music directory and it would scan all the files (just like Roon).
So both options are non-destructive and you can always go back to your old setup.
I guess you can try out Roon by just installing the server on your old Mac mini, for Volumio you will need another machine.
Than You Indiglo and wealas! It’s a steep learning curve and I appreciate the information and links to knowledge. I know that Roon is a very nice package but I am a bit turned off by the subscription cost. I don’t do streaming, at least not at this point. I know it is the way music distribution is going but I still prefer my own library of music that I own. It was built up over a long period of time and the music is part of my life. Streaming always feels a bit odd (I triedAmazon Prime music for a year). There is too much choice and no easy way to zoom in to what you may be interested in. That is where Roon comes in I guess. Volumio is less expensive but even they now have a deluxe service that has a monthly fee. Right now I just want to increase my basic knowledge and get a feel for all the alternatives.
Another reason I want to get away from Puremusic is the constant issues I experience with random stopping during play, Remote App malfunctions and digital clipping that occurs if you use the plug in EQs that they provide. Even when you turn the EQ off you still get clipping. I was recently breaking in a new set of speakers and they were sounding really bad. Turns out that this clipping issue was going on and I had to go back to defaults to get things back to normal. I have had many of these issues since day 1 through 2 versions of PM and it never seems to get better. Time to move on!
Another reason I want to get away from Puremusic is the constant issues I experience with random stopping during play, Remote App malfunctions and digital clipping that occurs if you use the plug in EQs that they provide. Even when you turn the EQ off you still get clipping. I was recently breaking in a new set of speakers and they were sounding really bad. Turns out that this clipping issue was going on and I had to go back to defaults to get things back to normal. I have had many of these issues since day 1 through 2 versions of PM and it never seems to get better. Time to move on!
I'm in exactly the same situation as you. Here's my setup:
About 15 years ago I ripped my 1200 CD's to flac files, and then converted those to apple lossless, and also to 320 mp3 (for my ipod and phone). I have an external drive hanging on the back (with a 12 south shelf) of my main iMac and also my workshop iMac. I also have a mac mini that I use as a server and a bittorrent client to grab british TV. The mac mini has one of the two internal drives setup to hold my music. I have the same iTunes library copied to each of the three locations. I also have mp3 versions on my laptops.
For years I've streamed my music from iTunes to up to 5 airport expresses or appleTV's. In my main two systems, I take the optical digital out to DACs of my own design. For less critical areas, I put use the analog output from the expresses.
You may wonder why I have so many copies of the same iTunes library. First, I am maniacal about backup (offsite too), and having multiple copies makes me sleep better at night. But as importantly, home sharing seems to always be broken. I have many albums that have individual tracks that refuse to play via home sharing, but play fine locally. I've dug into the files and metadata and I can't figure out why.
Apple continues to disappoint, by dropping the airport line, so I have been trying to figure out what to do next. Years ago I played with the squeezeboxes (before logitech bought them), and they worked really well, but the music browsing experience was dismal compared to iTunes. And that has been a theme, all other music management software seems to come up short one way or another. Don't get me wrong, iTunes is a steaming pile of crap (doubly so on a PC), but it has a lot going for it in terms of quickly finding and playing my music.
A year ago I bought a Naim Uniti Atom. I love that little unit! I took another external drive and put my music library on it. The Naim interface is quite nice, I could live with it and the cover notes from Rovi is really nice. The naim will play local files attached to it, it will serve up those files (but not to iTunes), and it can be an airplay or chomecast client. It also plays internet radio and such. Really sweet. I mostly use it as an airplay device.
I am also playing with some DIY solutions based on a Raspberry Pi and Moode. They are pretty snazzy and I'm still trying to figure out if they are good enough to take seriously. The one thing that they don't do is have two way communication to iTunes. You can use the volume slider in iTunes to set the hardware volume control in the DAC, but if you change the volume in the moode browser or the volume knob on the Pi, iTunes doesn't know about it and the volume slider is not updated. The Naim is truly bidirectional, you can use the naim remote or the glorious volume knob on top and iTunes volume slider tracks the changes, The itunes slider also changes the volume knob etc. The Naim also gets cover art for the display etc, where all the open source players (moode, volumio, etc) don't seem to do that.
I also bought a qnap NAS for a bunch of tasks around the house, and I was hoping that it's media serving would replace all my iTunes libraries sprinkled around the house. But the iTunes server is firefly, which has been dead for like a decade, and didnt work particularly well when it was being actively developed.
So at this point, I'm sticking with iTunes and using the airplay protocol to stream to airport expresses and ultimately to raspberry pi based devices (which will replace the expresses) as well as my Naim. I haven't found anything to replace iTunes as my GUI, but I haven't tried Roon (also turned off by the cost). I could live with the Naim interface, but that would mean dropping several K$ for more uniti devices.
Also I love to hear of a solution to spotty home sharing...
Also it's super easy to pull your music out of iTunes, because its not really IN iTunes. It all lives in a directory on your drive. Copy to wherever you want.
Sheldon
About 15 years ago I ripped my 1200 CD's to flac files, and then converted those to apple lossless, and also to 320 mp3 (for my ipod and phone). I have an external drive hanging on the back (with a 12 south shelf) of my main iMac and also my workshop iMac. I also have a mac mini that I use as a server and a bittorrent client to grab british TV. The mac mini has one of the two internal drives setup to hold my music. I have the same iTunes library copied to each of the three locations. I also have mp3 versions on my laptops.
For years I've streamed my music from iTunes to up to 5 airport expresses or appleTV's. In my main two systems, I take the optical digital out to DACs of my own design. For less critical areas, I put use the analog output from the expresses.
You may wonder why I have so many copies of the same iTunes library. First, I am maniacal about backup (offsite too), and having multiple copies makes me sleep better at night. But as importantly, home sharing seems to always be broken. I have many albums that have individual tracks that refuse to play via home sharing, but play fine locally. I've dug into the files and metadata and I can't figure out why.
Apple continues to disappoint, by dropping the airport line, so I have been trying to figure out what to do next. Years ago I played with the squeezeboxes (before logitech bought them), and they worked really well, but the music browsing experience was dismal compared to iTunes. And that has been a theme, all other music management software seems to come up short one way or another. Don't get me wrong, iTunes is a steaming pile of crap (doubly so on a PC), but it has a lot going for it in terms of quickly finding and playing my music.
A year ago I bought a Naim Uniti Atom. I love that little unit! I took another external drive and put my music library on it. The Naim interface is quite nice, I could live with it and the cover notes from Rovi is really nice. The naim will play local files attached to it, it will serve up those files (but not to iTunes), and it can be an airplay or chomecast client. It also plays internet radio and such. Really sweet. I mostly use it as an airplay device.
I am also playing with some DIY solutions based on a Raspberry Pi and Moode. They are pretty snazzy and I'm still trying to figure out if they are good enough to take seriously. The one thing that they don't do is have two way communication to iTunes. You can use the volume slider in iTunes to set the hardware volume control in the DAC, but if you change the volume in the moode browser or the volume knob on the Pi, iTunes doesn't know about it and the volume slider is not updated. The Naim is truly bidirectional, you can use the naim remote or the glorious volume knob on top and iTunes volume slider tracks the changes, The itunes slider also changes the volume knob etc. The Naim also gets cover art for the display etc, where all the open source players (moode, volumio, etc) don't seem to do that.
I also bought a qnap NAS for a bunch of tasks around the house, and I was hoping that it's media serving would replace all my iTunes libraries sprinkled around the house. But the iTunes server is firefly, which has been dead for like a decade, and didnt work particularly well when it was being actively developed.
So at this point, I'm sticking with iTunes and using the airplay protocol to stream to airport expresses and ultimately to raspberry pi based devices (which will replace the expresses) as well as my Naim. I haven't found anything to replace iTunes as my GUI, but I haven't tried Roon (also turned off by the cost). I could live with the Naim interface, but that would mean dropping several K$ for more uniti devices.
Also I love to hear of a solution to spotty home sharing...
Also it's super easy to pull your music out of iTunes, because its not really IN iTunes. It all lives in a directory on your drive. Copy to wherever you want.
Sheldon
Thank You for your perspective Sheldon. Puremusic uses the ITunes database/library but Puremusic software does the actual playback. For whatever reason, it does sound better to my ears than ITunes.
I’m leaning towards picking up an Allo USBridge and experimenting with that. We have a system in the kitchen/family room that could also benefit from access to a central music database. I used to have a separate music only external FireWire drive as well as a time machine backup drive. During one of the OS updates the 2 discs seem to have been converted to a raid setup. So now I have all files on both drives. Now the drive is always spinning where before raid it would spin down and be silent after the file was loaded for play (PM is playing from memory rather than disk). Another annoyance and another reason to get the pc out of the listening room.
I’m leaning towards picking up an Allo USBridge and experimenting with that. We have a system in the kitchen/family room that could also benefit from access to a central music database. I used to have a separate music only external FireWire drive as well as a time machine backup drive. During one of the OS updates the 2 discs seem to have been converted to a raid setup. So now I have all files on both drives. Now the drive is always spinning where before raid it would spin down and be silent after the file was loaded for play (PM is playing from memory rather than disk). Another annoyance and another reason to get the pc out of the listening room.
You could use something like Minimserver for your libraries and then use any Upnp controller (like Bubbleupnp and many others) to play your music on pretty much any device. You'll get the remote volume control and whatever search capabilities you like and pretty much any device out there supports dlna. The only catch is that any DSP has to happen on the playback device (rather than on the Roon or Volumio server).
Just began playing with Volumio.
If your Pi is a 4, it may not play 100% nice yet... It's new and know some other Pi applications are slow to fully port over to the 4. I have a 3b and no issues yet. Just running it into my TV and soundbar on account I don't have a DAC yet. Works great. I use the touch screen plugin to give me an image on the TV and then I turn off some settings so it plays nice with the touch plugin and it's been smooth sailing for me for a few days.
I've never had a Pi crash on me without doing something stupid to the BIOS and Config.
The tricky part of the Pi is that the USB is less than ideal for an output on account of it sharing some things with Wifi or Ethernet... Best practice is to use a HAT DAC that runs off the GPIO or use a Digi to get digital out, and use an outboard DAC.
The beauty of the Pi IMO is that you can tweak it, and no moving parts to worry about making noise or failing.
If your Pi is a 4, it may not play 100% nice yet... It's new and know some other Pi applications are slow to fully port over to the 4. I have a 3b and no issues yet. Just running it into my TV and soundbar on account I don't have a DAC yet. Works great. I use the touch screen plugin to give me an image on the TV and then I turn off some settings so it plays nice with the touch plugin and it's been smooth sailing for me for a few days.
I've never had a Pi crash on me without doing something stupid to the BIOS and Config.
The tricky part of the Pi is that the USB is less than ideal for an output on account of it sharing some things with Wifi or Ethernet... Best practice is to use a HAT DAC that runs off the GPIO or use a Digi to get digital out, and use an outboard DAC.
The beauty of the Pi IMO is that you can tweak it, and no moving parts to worry about making noise or failing.
I get a bunch of kernel panics when it boots and then Chromium loads and page not found error. The only way to fix it is to create a new SD and set up all my settings again. This has happened twice now.
Running on a Pi 3 B+
Do you shut the system down correctly? Do you have good PSU? People report corrupted filesystems on SD cards in RPis when powered off without proper shutdown sequence - often when their PSU drops voltage unexpectedly.
It is very unlikely that volumio (user-space software) could cause kernel panics. More likely a corrupted filesystem around changes generated by volumio - that is why the user-space daemon does not start up. Proper troubleshooting would require looking at logs, this is just my 2 cents.
It is very unlikely that volumio (user-space software) could cause kernel panics. More likely a corrupted filesystem around changes generated by volumio - that is why the user-space daemon does not start up. Proper troubleshooting would require looking at logs, this is just my 2 cents.
I think you hit the nail on the head! So ... when I do a shutdown, the status light blinks a bit but the Pi never shuts down (red LED still on). Once activity is done (green LED), is it then safe to unplug? The other issue is the case I have the Pi & 7" touchscreen in hides the LED's. I never used Shutdown before, just unplugged it. Come to think of it, that is when it usually gets corrupt.
On an unrelated note ... can I take it to a friend's house with a USB thumb drive in it holding music and play without a network connection? I would just lose the ability to control it from my phone but I could still use the touchscreen?
Sorry for the dumb mistake ... still learning!
Yes you can, and you can still control it from your phone by configuring the network in Volumio in AP (Access Point) mode.
Then you connect your phone to the local Volumio network and you can access the player. See 'Volumio Hotspot' in the Quick Start guide.
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Well it was going well ... I was doing a Shutdown before removing power and no problems on boot-up. Spent the past 2 days listening to various formats flawlessly. It was working good so I decided to put the cover back on where I cannot access the SD card. Then I went and tried to enable the Experimental User Interface and it asked to Restart. I hit the Restart button and now tons of errors on boot. ARGH!!!!
And again it crashed on me after a proper Shutdown. So I reinstall the latest version and it tells me it needs to restart to enable the Touchscreen interface. Clicking Restart IN THE INTERFACE causes file system corruption when it reboots! Unless you have a ton of free time to constantly burn images and set it up over and over and over again, look elsewhere!
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