What could be better than taking the time during a sick day to create a new plugin? 
Disclaimer
This plugin was developed with the assistance of AI (Claude by Anthropic). While it has been tested on real hardware and is functional, it is provided as-is without warranty. Use at your own risk. The author assumes no responsibility for any damage to your hardware, software, or data. Always back up your Volumio configuration before installing third-party plugins.
Description
After creating the OLED display plugin I was wondering if I could tackle a long missed feature in Volumio. I’m talking about a way to find music that has been recently added to the library. With around 42k+ tracks it gets kinda hard to keep track of what’s been added recently and all those new additions seemed to disappear in the abyss.
I again worked with Claude and would like to present you my Recently Added Plugin.
What you see: A new tile sits next to Albums, Artists, Favorites, etc. on the Browse page, with the same visual treatment as the stock tiles. Tapping it gives a list of four time windows: Last 7 days, Last 14 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days. Tap a window and you get the additions within that range, grouped into two sections - Albums on top, Artists below. Album entries forward to Volumio’s standard music-library view, so playback, queue, and artwork all work the same as everywhere else in the UI. Tapping an artist drills into just that artist’s recent additions in the same window.
Settings: A View Mode dropdown lets you switch between “Albums only”, “Artists only”, and “Albums and Artists” (default). For libraries where you typically add a few albums at a time, “Both” is convenient. For larger ingestion sessions, switching to a single mode keeps the list focused. There are also three MPD connection settings (host, port, query timeout) but the defaults work for any standard Volumio install.
How it works under the hood: The plugin is intentionally stateless. There’s no separate index, no filesystem watcher, no SQLite database, and no native modules to compile. When you tap a window, the plugin sends a single ‘find modified-since ’ command to MPD over its standard protocol port, gets back the list of files modified in that window, groups them by parent directory and AlbumArtist in memory, and renders the result. MPD’s tag cache makes this fast even for libraries with several thousand tracks. No queries happen while you’re listening to music or browsing other sections, the plugin only talks to MPD when you actively open a Recently Added view.
What this means in practice: Because the plugin reads directly from MPD’s database, what shows up in Recently Added is exactly what’s browsable in Volumio’s Music Library section. There’s no possibility of “phantom” entries that fail to open. The corollary: when you add new music to your library, run Volumio’s normal Update Library action as you always have, and the new content appears in Recently Added at the same moment it appears everywhere else. The plugin is a read-only view over MPD’s truth, not a parallel record-keeping system.
Features
- Time-windowed browse: four windows out of the box — Last 7 / 14 / 30 / 90 days
- Configurable view modes: Albums only / Artists only / Both (default)
- Artist drill-down: tap an artist to see only their recently-added albums in the selected window
- AlbumArtist grouping: compilations stay together even when per-track Artist values differ
- Album-tag titles: album entries show the embedded
Albumtag (with folder-name fallback for untagged music) - Album cover artwork: tiles use Volumio’s standard albumart resolution, with fallback icons when no cover exists
- Native multilingual UI: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish — picked up automatically from Volumio’s language setting
- Zero database overhead: stateless reads against MPD’s existing tag cache; no SD-card writes, no watcher state
- Always in sync with Volumio: because we read what MPD reads, every visible album is by construction browsable; the standard “Update Library” workflow makes new music appear here too
Screen Previews
Browse tile
Time-window list (root)
Albums + Artists section view
Album drill-down
Artist drill-down
Limitations
- Updating tags of an audio file might cause it to appear in the Recently Added view again after updating the library as MPD doesn’t differ when the file has been added and when it has been updated (it only knows one date).
- The plugin has been tested on RPi 4 with Volumio 4.119 and 42k files in library without performance impact. No guarantee that impacts would not occur on larger libraries and weaker systems - feedback welcome!
- Changing the system language might only be adapted to the plugin after a reboot.
Source
Let me know what you think!
