Thanks for pointing out the upnp renderer option to me.
In the app, it was showing as ON. I turned the renderer off and then back on again and now it is appearing as a renderer for other applications to use.
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Some good news - I got the M3U importer plug-in working. The way it handles the path to your playlists is confusing. But now it is working the playlists are available which is a big step forward.
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So I have spent quite a lot of time trying to ensure my music library and playlists work with Volumio on the Rivo. I am surprised to keep finding that Volumio requires your files to be organised in quite a specific way to ensure that things will work (cover, playlists, etc.)
Here are the latest two things I have yet to find a workaround - Wheaten can you help?
(a) If you select “Albums” in Volumio from your set of music sources, the albums are not shown in strict alphabetical order mixed across genres, instead each genre is shown in A-Z order followed by the next. Hoe do i get Volumio to just show all the albums in alphabetical order?
(b) In album with various artists, the tracks from the album are not listed in track number order but alphabetically by artist name. How do i get Volumio to show the tracks in track number order?
One of the things that attracted me to the Rivo was the idea that the hardware and software formed an integrated solution. I thought the Volumio would be in more robust shape than it is proving to be given that it has been a OS for Raspberry PI devices etc for years now.
I just got an email from Davide in Volumio support saying M3U playlists and import are not supported by Volumio.
I am sorry, that is not acceptable. You cannot market a hardware product as a media player with associated library software and just dismiss a widely used playlist format out of hand like that. Say that support is still being worked on, or explain how playlists need to be adapted so they can be imported (the community written plug-in is doing that). But you cannot seriously just dismiss something as important as that.
You might want to try the Jellyfin Server + Jellyfin Client plugins (disclaimer: I am the author of both).
The idea is to let Jellyfin Server index your music, then use the Jellyfin Client to access your music on the server. It provides standard sorting and filtering, so hopefully would meet your needs.
Regarding m3u playlists, although I haven’t tried myself, they seem to be supported in Jellyfin (more here).
If you would like to give this a try, both plugins are installable from the plugin store. Also check the README (server and client) on how to setup (more steps than Volumio, but still pretty straightforward).
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Hi Patrick - thanks very much for stepping in to help.
I haven’t come across Jellyfin before so I will take a look.
I have to admit, though, that I am not asking Volumio to do anything that should be beyond it. I am not asking files to be served to any other device than the Rivo.
Jellyfin is more of a mediaserver like plex, you can then stick with JRiver and use the Rivo as endpoint. As for library, playlist, dynamic playlist, nothing beats JRiver.
I agree about JRiver. I use it for when I am putting playlists together and administrating my music collection. But then what I want to do is turn my pc off, have the Rivo unit show its UI on a TV, and control the playback from an IPad. That means that, at that point, I am interacting with the Rivo via the Volumio software.
These things I am asking the Volumio software to do are pretty basic for a media player. And it already does many tasks well. Show albums tracks in order. Playing M3U playlists. These are basics I expect from the software with an ‘audiophile’ product.
You can experiment with “Media servers” in Volumio.
I know I can do that - I already have asset upnp running on the NAS, and can run JRiver as a server. But there should not be any need to - Volumio should be able to handle these simple tasks itself.
I am getting some wierd behaviour using the Rivo as a Upnp target.
Playing from JRiver on a PC, it takes a long time for playback to start when initiated, and only the first song in a playlist is played. JRiver does not report the playback position correctly once it starts.
Playing from MConnectHD on an Ipad with Asset uPnP as the DLNA server, the situation is a bit better but still not perfect: playback takes 2-3 second to start, playback position is not correct in Mconnect, but plyalists are played properly played sequentially.
These issues were not present using either SotM Neo or Ifi Zen Stream as the target using JRiver or MconnectHD.
My support stops here.
I can’t support Rivo specific issues, as I have no reference/access to it.
Regards,
Thanks Wheaten - you have been a great help, although I suspect a lot of my issues are not specific to Rivo but linked to Volumio as a whole. However, I do think there is a step change once software and hardware comes together so what might be acceptable bugs in a software only product are not acceptable when you pay (a lot more money) for hardware.
Hopefully@volumio will now chime in.
In the mean time, I have taken delivery of a new linear power supply to use with the Rivo. As this thread is already very long I think I should put discussion of that in a separate thread.
Summary of first impression so far: Hardware sounds very good, marked step up in quality to my prior streamers when using the USB out. I like the Volumio interface and much of it works well. But there are lot of niggles with what I regard as basic issues with the software, which i hope to be able to sort out via Volumio’s support.
Tidal connect works perfectly out of the box. But use as upnp renderer has been disappointing so far compared to prior renderers.
Being told M3U playlists are simply not supported is not acceptable for an ‘audiophile’ product. I hope the support (beyond Wheaten’s excellent help) improves from here…
Like Wheaten has posted earlier, you can create a support ticket since you have premium support included. This is still a community forum, so moderators and other users like myself will help as far we can. The employees from Volumio will adress issues and questions in the community forum when they have the available time - but to get help/support the fastest way is still to create a ticket.
Thanks Wolfman - I will create a series of support tickets for the issues I have encountered. However, it has not been uncommon to see issues being addressed by @Volumio here.
It is obviously helpful for those who may be considering purchasing the Rivo that issues individuals encounter with it, and the support they receieve, is reported in an open forum like this one.
I just got the following from Davide in Volumio support in response to my support ticket about Upnp performance of Rivo:
"the UPnP structure needs to undergo a complete redesign due to a software failure, and this issue is unrelated to the Rivo hardware itself.
Rebuilding the UPnP functionality is currently a top priority on our to-do list.
Rest assured, we are committed to addressing this as swiftly as possible.
In the meantime, we hope you’ll discover and enjoy other features that enhance your overall listening experience.
Thank you for your understanding”
I have not seen a thread in these forums reporting this.
That means you got a scoop. 
Hi @malcolmbarr I see that you received your Rivo and are already stress-testing the new toy
I have not been active in these discussions since I have been in the USA for the last 12 days. But I see that Bruno and Davide took great care of you in the meantime (also there would be no way for me to handle all requests…)
Let me provide some further insights to what Davide already reported you on your exchanges.
UPNP\DLNA Renderer
This is quite a complex matter. UPNP\DLNA should be a standard, where apps implement it as per the standard and it just works… right? Well, from our experience it turns out that every single app out there which implements UPNP does it a little bit differently, and therefore behaviour varies greatly from app to app. This explains why the behaviour you see (latency, misaligment of time) happens.
We have been fixing and implementing several impros on our UPNP receiver side but we are still not getting 100% right as we want, hence Davide’s reply.
What I would recommend to do here is to use BubbleUPNP which has proven to be the most reliable third party UPNP app in conjunction with Volumio.
M3U situation
Here the situation is quite simple: M3U playlists are simply a list of files in text format, so supporting them is quite easy from an integration perspective. However, as always, devil is in the details, and it requires that files are listed with absolute paths (which is almost never the case) to work correctly.
This results in M3U almost never work when imported on a platform different from the one they were created on, and that’s the reason why we neglected this feature (as it would require manual renaming of the paths in the file itself to make it work)
SORTING SITUATION
This is one of the most requested features, and we are working on it. There’s some code we are now testing internally to allow sorting for TIDAL and QOBUZ, and if this works we will then extend it to local files