Newbie questions - Volumio premium on Raspberry Pi

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1

Hi there,

I’m trying out Volumio Premium on my collection of Raspberry Pis, trying to set up multi-room. There’s a few things I can’t easily find answers to, so apologies if these are FAQs.

How does discovery work on the android client? My Volumio instances are all on the same wireless network, but they’re connected to different access points on that network. Sometimes the app detects all of them, sometimes not. Knowing how discovery works will enable me to debug any potential network issues. The network is IPv4 and IPv6 and I’m using mikrotik network hardware. My library is on a desktop SMB server.

What’s the minimum hardware spec? I’m running the latest volumio version on all of them. I have a zero w, a 3B and a 3A. I’m amazed that the zero works at all, but it does. I want to give volumio a decent chance though, so if all of my RPi are below the minimum spec, then I probably need to upgrade. I’m using a combination of HAT (pimoroni phat dac and raspberry pi dac +, and USB (schiit modi) DACs . Sound quality is great, even on the Pi Zero.

Group does not always work (I’ve not tried this with the Pi Zero, just with the 3B and 3A). Sometimes the device I try to add to the group from the android client is successfully added, sometimes adding fails (it briefly appears in the group, then drops back out to the “available devices” list in a couple of seconds). Livelog on the server shows a StreamServer connection to the client, immediately followed by an exception in StreamSession (“read_some: End of
file”). How can I debug this more?

Track ordering when playing an album is not clear. There’s lots of this in previous questions but no definitive answer. It looks like, in the absence of track number tags, volumio will follow some kind of alphanumeric sort order, but before I go and repair eveything to make sure track number prefixes are uniform in file names and present in metadata tags, I need to know if it’s worthwhile. How does volumio decide on track order?

All suggestions gratefully received!

Thanks in advance … Jonathan

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So after some experimentation …

Volumio seems to work acceptably quickly (it’s not exactly snappy, but it’s perfectly acceptable with 650 + albums, on a CIFS share from another computer) on the PI 3A and 3B. It also works on the Zero W that I have, but I’ve only really used that for web radio and as a member of a multi-room group.

It does depend on a reliable wifi network and seems to be upset by noise and poor signal strength (maybe because it relies on mDNS). I’m still messing with my (admittedly old) wireless network which can only do 802.11b/g/n and I think I need better coverage. The group failures seem entirely related to poor wifi signals. I raised a support ticket for this issue, and Davide was pretty helpful. Given that Volumio is a consumer product and the yearly subscription is inexpensive (about the cost of a couple of vinyl albums), I think the support offering is good.

I had a lot of problems with track play order and poor response until I realised that many of the albums I had were zipped. The files were opened quite happily by kodi, but that was running on much faster hardware than a PI 3B and the files were also on local disk. All my track ordering issues went away when I unzipped everything and removed the ZIP archives.

I’ve also finally got used to the web / app UI. Once I’d stopped fighting with that, things got a lot better.

Anyway, if this helps anyone, so much the better.

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