I have newly discovered Volumio and successfully installed it to a 2TB drive in a Shuttle fanless PC, running headless. Doing the on-disc install was a doddle: I simply told it to install to disk after booting from a USB stick and it worked. I pulled the stick, rebooted and up it came.
I connect my KEF LSX speakers through a high quality USB to optical SPDIF adaptor using an optical switch so that the television sound can also use the single optical port on the speakers.
I’m very impressed with the sound quality, although I’m less than happy with the Volumio control app in the cramped confines of my Android phone’s screen. I tried to nick my wife’s large screen tablet but she wasn’t having any of that. Overall, a very positive start.
I have a personal music store shared from my main PC which the system interrogates perfectly, but I want to transfer my music files onto the internal disc of the little Shuttle PC and I cannot find instructions for doing that, or even if it’s possible.
Can anyone help - do I have to use a terminal and change the partitioning of my HDD or what?
Hi Edform, and welcome to Volumio & it’s Community.
Edited your title to include x86, because possibly different answers.
It probably depends on how you intend to maintain your music library. If you are accessing it from a Windows machine, then using the samba share “Internal Storage” which maps to ‘/mnt/INTERNAL’ on your Shuttle should work ok. You could also have a separate music partition on your drive accessed directly by fstab.
Thanks for the reply Ian. Have I understood what you said correctly - that the installation actually creates a Samba share with the name you gave?
How do I interact with the Shuttle - using a terminal and putty?
I hoped I would be able to populate my music store by mapping it as a drive on my desktop PC and copying music into it as I acquire it. I believe there is a CD ripping facility in Volumio, but I’m happy to do such work on my much more powerful desktop PC.
Nice to be wandering around bewildered in a new digital world . I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once I’ve found the door.
Ed Form
I spotted a message that said to open the Windows Explorer and enter the address \\volumio, so I did this and was shown three shares called Internal Storage, NAS and USB. I mapped a drive to the one called Internal Storage and was shown an empty folder. BUT when I tried to copy the contents of my Music folder to it, the write speed ran at only 1MB/sec but fell to zero rate and then rose again to 1MB/Sec and back to zero and so on - it was going to be a 3-day copy procedure - except it never would have finished because it was unstable and kept falling over.
I looked into slow write speeds to Samba shares from Windows 10 [and 11] and tried everything I could find to speed writing up but nothing worked.
So, I copied the whole Music store to a USB disk drive and connected that to my little Shuttle music server where it turned up as a new folder inside the USB storage entity. I then used Windows Explorer to copy all the contents of this new folder to the Internal Storage area which transferred the music files at better than 30Mb/second - it’s only USB2, so that’s not bad.
Turns out I wasn’t sorted. The copy across went perfectly, but the database simply would not see what I transferred. I spent a few hours listening to new stuff on Qobuz before I discovered the problem.
I rebooted off the USB stick version, reinstalled to the HDD and ran the music from the USB disk perfectly. When I first tried to open the music the database kicked in and catalogued it in about a minute.
I just began copying the music to internal storage again. Hopefully this time the database will handle it.
I don’t know what went wrong on the first install, but it simply never succeeded in making a valid database for its internal storage and eventually fell into constantly restarting the player.
For the second install, as mentioned in my last message, I booted from the USB stick allowed it to settle down and then used the menu option to install to disk, which succeeded.
I then attached my portable USB drive onto which I had copied my music library. The moment it spotted this, the system announced it was cataloguing it and took no more than a minute to complete this, after which the Android control app could play music from the USB disk perfectly.
I then started up my desktop pc, opened the Windows Explorer file browser, typed in the address \\volumio and was rewarded with a display of 3 folders: Internal Storage, NAS and USB. Inside USB was my portable drive as a folder which I opened, picked its entire contents and copied it all to Internal Storage.
I then disconnected the USB drive, rebooted the Little Shuttle PC and restarted the Volumio app on my phone. It began cataloguing the Internal Storage entity at once and I now have a rock solid, music server.
I’m not sure why I had to log into the app with my Volumio account to open the features of the Premium version and log in again to MyVolumio to connect to my Qobuz account - why not combine it into a single log-in? But that aside this system works very well.
Controlling it from the phone works, but the small screen real estate is a pain, the browser version on a bigger screen is much nicer.
. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once I’ve found the door.
Not a big user of Samba, so no idea what to expect as to typical transfer rates.