Hi,
I’ve installed and reinstalled Volumio 2 (multiple sub-versions over months) to multiple Pi 3B+ systems with 3 different DACS and 3 different touchscreens in various combinations. Originally, I was using 256GB microSD cards with a separate partition which held about 220GB of music files. This mix included a couple hundred artists, at least. Volumio was able to scan those partitions into my library without any problem. Unfortunately, while using those devices, each of them eventually corrupted at least one of those expensive memory cards to the point of being unable to recreate partitions. As a result, I gave up on large microSD cards and switched to plugging a thumb drive containing around 10,000 music files (~230GB on a 256GB thumb drive) into a USB port on the Pi to use as a local USB music library. The boot SD is now a 32GB dedicated card on each machine.
Using a separate thumb drive for music storage seems to be less prone to corruption, so far. Unfortunately now, I have a different problem. After I plug in the USB thumb drive, I tell Volumio to scan or update the music library. It quickly counts up to 99 artists, pauses, resets the artist count to 0 and then stops scanning completely. The 99 artists that it supposedly scanned are never actually added to the library. There are zero entries in the library. There are no error message popup. It doesn’t do anything at all. So, I can’t get it to scan my music library on any of the hardware combinations I’ve tried. I even put the 230GB of files on huge 512GB thumb drives, in case Volumnio needed extra space on the library drive for storing its own information. The result is the same. It counts up to 99 artists then resets to zero and aborts without an error. Nothing is ever added to the library.
The file structure on the thumb drive is alphabetical folders in the root directory (folders with single letter names of the letters A through Z). Then, each alphabetical character folder contains alphabetically sorted artist name folders which start with that letter of the alphabet. Then, inside each artist folder is a set of folders holding each of their albums. Each album folder optionally holds disc folders when it is a set. The last level is the individual tracks for each disc stored as FLAC files. It’s organized this way to absolutely prevent any particular folder from having more than 510 entries in it. In reality, none of the folders in this tree ever reach more than 30-40 entries. The root folder, which literally can’t have more than 510 entries under FAT32 only has about 30 entries total. So, folder limitations aren’t causing the problem. Plus, as I said earlier, this file structure worked fine when it was on a partition of the microSD card. It just corrupted the microSD over time (despite me always using shutdown).
I have made a much smaller test version of my library using the same thumb drives and which had less than 99 artists on it. In those cases the library updates with no problem. The problem always occurs when the thumb drive has music from more than 99 artists on it. Also, when I have the full sized library plugged in, I can browse to all of the artist folders using the file manager, so the Pi is definitely able to read the entire 512GB and 256GB drives.
SO - My question: Is there an artificial limit of 99 artists built into Volumio for USB storage of the music library?
If not, what’s going on here? In every case, on every hardware combination, it stops and resets at 99. Any ideas?
Thanks!
-Bill Dempsey
P.S. I’m having another issue where Volumio won’t let me add an entire artist to the queue or start playback for an entire folder being read from a DLNA server, but that one isn’t as critical as solving the local library issues for my particular application.