Not quite, it’s currently not native supported, but you can do it via Berryboot.
You’ll still need a SD card to boot form, but the original Volumio image can run from USB.
Berryboot (older version, so it supports rpi2/3/4 and 32 bit)
Please google for how berryboot works, load a custom image from USB etc.
Not sure if Volumio is looking for support questions as things might not work out of the box.
If they are OK with it, I will create a tutorial.
I’ve tested it and it’s booting. Setup run without any issues. Didn’t do much testing.
Audio jack not recognized (only HDMI)
Haven’t been able to test an USB DAC, seems the Pi can’t deliver enough power.
Well i have about 65000 albums in my mediathek. That meens 65000 covers. If every cover is only 50kB i would need about 3GB of space only for the covers. My roon database for instance is about 20GB.
Now tell me please how to store about 20GB of data in 2, 4 or 8GB RAM? I thik this is impossible! Storing the database on a ssd would definitely speed up the hole usage experience of volumio (escpaxially scrolling through library) and i think this should one of the first priority! There should be at least a possibility to choose a folder or drive where the database shall be saved.
Honestly volumio is rather fast at the backend level, i doubt you could gain significant speed improvements
With SSD over SD card, unless we compare slow SD card to top level SSD disk.
Do you mean “scrolling throught library” as actually scrolling the huge library with mouse wheel or something else? If that’s laggy or slow, it’s the UI not the actual data fetching from backend.
well i have an sandisk extreme pro and a an old 32gb SSD on my pi. the ssd reads data 4-5 times faster than the sd card (200MB/s to 40-60MB/s) and is cheaper! if you scroll through the library volumio has to read the covers permanently from sd card to show them and nobody can tell me that there is no difference between a slow and a fast device.
i think the team should spent his energy in implemeting an option to choose a database path and not in excuses why it doesn’t work or is impossible.
thinking, believing or doubting is not knowing! a serious developer should try something out and and not escape into any excuses
Volumio will first try to read a cover file from the album location or artist from the artist folder of your music library
If it can’t find it, it will try to get it form MusicBrainz and stores this in /data/albumart/web
Since this location is static on the SD, it’s pretty fail safe, program this behavior’s on some “Unknown” external disc, might introduce unwanted side effects.
Compared to loading it from eMMC vs SD it takes about 5 sec longer for the first page load. After that it can be neglected as Volumio loads faster from SD then I can scroll.
Only on a new fresh install, opening Artist or Album view will take longer, until everything is cashed. But this is a one timer. (I took care of my library with tagging and art)
Should Volumio spend a couple of days programming and testing to win 5 seconds, I wouldn’t do it.
Hopes this gives you a better answer.
(ps back to the original request of this topic, I have been an advocate that Volumio boots from an external device for a long time. But I haven’t had issues with the SD for a year, so also that part is not that important for me anymore)
