Hi everyone,
New to Volumio and so far having great fun listening to all my music through this wonderful software.
My setup is an Intel NUC running USB into a NAD M51 DAC which in turn plus into my hifi system. I am using the Nad USB Audio 2.0 device in Volumio.
Using any of the three volume mixers available; software, hardware or none I can play back my audio files (MP3, FLAC, AIFF,etc) stored on my NAS with no issues. There is no volume control in Volumio when i use the Hardware option so I assume my DAC doesn’t support volume control (It has its own via remote). When evaluating the sound of the volume mixers, the software volume mixer does not perform as well as hardware or none options. I have therefore chosen None as I control my system volume from my Denon amplifier.
I have an issue with audio from the Spotify plugin when using Hardware or None for the volume mixer. the Spotify plugin produces no sound for songs selected from playlists through the Volumio interface. The tracks show a counter as if playing but no sound comes out. Whilst the volume mixer is set at None or Hardware, if I play songs from my mobile phone Spotify app and select Volumio from the list of playout devices the sound works perfectly.
When I choose the Software volume mixer navigating and playing songs within Volumio works perfectly. Sharing from my mobile phone running the spotify app works fine as well.
So the ideal setting functionality wise is Software mixing but obviously as mentioned before, I would prefer not to use the Software mixer as there is a degradation in sound quality, especially when listening to 192/24 FLAC files and it is quite noticeable to me.
My setup is as follows;
Intel NUC NUC5i3RYH running 128gb SSD. Volumio loaded on SSD.
Volumio Version 2.387,
Spotify Plugin is labelled as “Updated 18-2-2018”, there is no specific version number given. This was installed through the Volumio interface.
In order to try and resolve myself I looked up some posts in the help section of the forum and saw people suggesting to review the spopd.conf file.
I remoted to my machine and looked at my etc/spopd.conf file and when the Volumio is configured as Software volume control the file looks as follows (minus my credentials);
[spop]
spotify_username =
spotify_password =
high_bitrate = true
audio_output = sox
pretty_json = true
search_results = 50
cache_path =/run/shm
[sox]
output_type = alsa
output_name = softvolume
If I change the Volumio to Hardware or None Volume Control the output_name changes to output_name = hw:5, the rest of the file remains the same.
Based on another thread I to manually override the variable of output_name = ${outdev} in the data/plugins/music_service/spop folder in the file named spop.conf.tmpl based on some recommendations. I tried variables of hw:0 and hw:1 and then re-saved the Plugin settings in the interface and restarted the Mixer and verified these settings had taken effect in the etc/spopd.conf file however was still without sound when using anything but the software mixer in Volumio (once i had reset the spop.conf.tmpl file back to its original setting).
I then queried out the audio devices in my system with the play -l command.
volumio@volumio:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC283 Analog [ALC283 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 5: N20 [NAD USB Audio 2.0], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
It seems that device hw:5 is the correct hardware device as selected by the software when the output_name = ${outdev} in the spop.conf.tmpl file. So I am a little confused. In a last ditch attempt I hardcoded the output_name = ${outdev} variable to softvolume (which works when set Volumio) in the tmpl file and this was fine when the software mixer was selected, when I changed to Hardware or None as the volume mixer even though the setting remained in the file, playback would not work.
Some help here would be greatly appreciated, I am not new to computers but new to Volumio and Linux…
Thanks
Drew from Australia
