Hi,
I find the features and actual streaming performance of Volumio to be excellent. The Spotify integration works also, when I want to play something I don’t have. Volumio does a great job at reconnecting to the USB DAC quickly when I turn my amp on.
I find however that the Volumio interface is sluggish, and it can require patience sometimes to get to an album and get it to start playing.
I think it’s a bit better in a browser on my desktop/laptop than from the iOS app, but still far from zippy.
I’m running two devices, one Rpi 3B+ (1GB memory) and one 4B (2GB memory). In both cases I have the touchscreen plugin enabled. I understand this is a bit taxing on memory on the 3B+, but I thought things would be better with the 4B. The 4B currently shows about 1.2-1.3GB memory in use.
I wonder if it is Rpi performance, or client performance that is the problem, and if what I’m experiencing is normal or if there is anything I can do about it, or if the way Volumio is architected right now performance is negatively affected by library size?
There is a difference in performance between the Pi3 and Pi4, but mostly when it comes to things like Library scans or album art caching. Once things are running, there isn’t a huge noticeable difference between the two.
My library stats are as follows:
volumio@ping:~$ mpc stats
Artists: 1638
Albums: 2126
Songs: 28847
Play Time: 0 days, 0:00:00
Uptime: 0 days, 10:54:41
DB Updated: Fri Dec 29 00:15:31 2023
DB Play Time: 88 days, 9:13:28
Follow-up on this. I think the bottleneck is the MPD service itself, and not the Volumio UI.
I don’t know if there is any way around this, or any quick fixes.
I wish there might be some follow-up on this. I’m only myself, and not others, so I don’t know for sure if this is usual or expected. Do others with similar or larger size libraries also experience a need for patience?
The one thing I haven’t tried is running Volumio on higher performance amd64 hardware. Is that recommended/required for performance?
I guess I could try deploying in a VM on my desktop and see if it fares any better.
The VM install wouldn’t be for production/playback. Playback isn’t the problem, but just to see if the same software on much more capable hardware solves the issues or if it still struggles.
However, I’ll give the beta version a go first, thanks for that suggestion.
Right now I’m running Plexamp headless on the Pi. It solves the management/navigation issues since that’s all handled by the main Plex server, but has other issues and I lose a lot of functionality on the Pi vs Volumio - touchscreen interface, dsp plugins, and other integrations.
Probably the best solution there would be if Volumio could integrate with Plex so I could keep Volumio as the streamer device and still access my Plex library. That’s a whole other issue of course, and I’m not sure if Plex is interested in supporting such endeavour.
Google Cast would also work, and be a more general solution and lossless alternative to Bluetooth and Airplay (and I suspect a lot less complicated than Plex integration).
I’d be more than happy to have either as a Volumio Premium feature, if either was possible.
Anyways, best of luck to me, I’ll report back after I re-install the beta this weekend.