Dear Volumiophiles,
following the recent widespread commotion about Artificial Intelligence and how disruptive\frightening\cool\whatever everyone thought this is, we at Volumio got thinking how we could use this technology to enhance our listening sessions experience.
So we got to work and in the last 2 months we crafted what we think might be a valuable addition to Volumio’s offering.
For the curious among you: yes, we have integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology into Volumio 
This is what is all about:
Supersearch
This is a search mode, alternative to regular search, that allows you to type a question like input. Something like:
- Summer disco dance
- Italian funk
- Songs for sunny sunday
Or like you were requesting to play music to a friend or a shop clerk. While the results are not 100% accurate, we believe it’s a great way to discover new music or create tailored playlists.
To enable Supersearch, simply head to search and toggle the ordinary\supersearch toggle switch.
The results from the search query are interpreted by AI and will result on a list of tracks that Volumio will match with your library (local files, tidal, qobuz, spotify etc) and present only the available tracks.
This means, that to have optimal results with Supersearch (and all the other goodies in this release) is suggested to have at least one streaming service enabled (spotify, tidal, qobuz) and a local music library of at least 1000 tracks.
RELATED ARTISTS AND ALBUMS
Easy as it sounds. When browsing your artists and albums, we present you with related artists and albums. This is to further enhance “The music rabbit hole” experience.
When you then select a related Artist or Album, if they are to be found in your library (again streaming or local) you can directly browse them.
INFINITY PLAYBACK
This has been one of the most requested features during these years. Some call it “Random Playback” some others “Radios”. This is what we came up with.
If you enable Infinity Playback, when you get to the end of your queue, Volumio will load approximately 10 new tracks which are related from your library (streaming or local). So you can end up with an endless list of similar tracks.
Personally, this has been our favourite addition so far. We discovered a ton of new music and we got music playing all day thanks to it.
Infinity Playback can be enabled by clicking on the “Infinity” Icon on playback page
Or by cycling trough repeat options in the queue menu:
Tweaking of Artist and Album presentation
We took the chance to do a slight redesign of the artist and album presentations, to offer a less cluttered and more optimized view.
All the new features above, except the artist and album presentation, are available ONLY for Volumio Premium users.
Why a beta testing
We are now very happy on how the overall result came along. But as always, before releasing it to the public, we are keen to receive your feedbacks.
Especially we are keen to understand:
- Is the presentation of the features intuitive? If not, let us know what you struggle with and ideally a suggestion on how to make it more intuitive.
- Is it adding value to your listening experience?
- Are you experiencing issues? If yes, please let us know what is the issue and please paste a log for us to troubleshoot.
On top of that, AI (we use OpenAI APIs) can be a really expensive piece of tech to pay for, so we are keen to understand if the costs that we will incur make sense considering the value you guys get from this.
How to try it
Simply put your device in TEST MODE and update to any version from 3.502 onwards
ENJOY!
Don’t mess around with any silly gimmicks, create a stable system to just listen to MUSIC. You are still driving me to roon…