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Post by bourneendboy on May 5, 2019 8:07:46 GMT
I've been using a USB memory stick plugged into my Pi/Boss for some time with good results. However, yesterday I got the Onedrive plugin working within Volumio and was pleasantly surprised how much better the sq was.
After a couple of posts over at AOS, I gather the Pi's USB port is not the best place for storage. The Onedrive option sounds good, but it appears you can only select single songs, not artwork etc (maybe this will come).
Another option I have is using Bubble UPNP on my Android phone and use Volumio as a renderer. I have a largish micro USB card in my phone with the same files on. I tried this briefly and my initial impression was that it works well.
In theory, should this sound the same as Onedrive or any other storage not using the USB port on the Pi?
Thanks for any advice chaps!
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Post by Pinch on May 5, 2019 9:21:04 GMT
I don't know anything about the Onedrive implementation, but I like the renderer option, shifting a certain amount of the workload onto another device, and reducing the load on the Pi. In my setup I have another headless Pi sitting on the network, running Raspbian and the linux version of JRiver Media Center. I know that JRiver has it's detractors as playback software, but for playback management it works very nicely (and to my mind it's unbeaten for library management). I keep all the files on a NAS drive, but they could be stored on a USB drive connected directly to this Pi without any sq problems, since it's a step removed from the playback chain. With DLNA rendering enabled on the playback-Pi, the Pi running JRiver then registers this as an available playback zone, to which playback can then be controlled via either a smartphone app or a web gui. If I need to do anything on JRiver-Pi - like importing new files or fixing tags - I just use remote desktop from my tablet.
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Post by MartinT on May 5, 2019 10:25:42 GMT
The OneDrive plugin does work rather well, as does any streaming. Anything USB is not so good.
Why not look for an inexpensive NAS drive to put on your network with all your files? It can be hidden away anywhere and accessed by the Pi. Works very well.
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162 
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Post by seanm on May 5, 2019 12:13:28 GMT
I have used my Pi / Boss combo playing flac files in two different setups. Firstly, a proper QNAP NAS and secondly a large 4TB USB3 drive hanging off of a decent Asus router pretending to be a NAS. It does a rather good job and suits my nomadic lifestyle.
In both cases all the network connections are wired ethernet and SMB "windows networking shares" is the file sharing protocol. A few years ago, I read that NFS, the Unix file sharing protocol was better for our needs, but never tried it. Currently, I am not in a position to do so.
Sean
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Post by bourneendboy on May 6, 2019 7:21:23 GMT
This sounds interesting and possibly the cheapest option as I already have a hard drive and memory sticks I can make use of Are you using Volumio on your playback Pi? I may come back with some questions  This is referring to Pinch's post (thought I used the quote option). |
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Post by bourneendboy on May 6, 2019 7:27:49 GMT
The OneDrive plugin does work rather well, as does any streaming. Anything USB is not so good. Why not look for an inexpensive NAS drive to put on your network with all your files? It can be hidden away anywhere and accessed by the Pi. Works very well. Had a look at some NAS options and see they are above £100 at best, will have a hunt for a second-hand one, but I think the Pi running as a server may be my best option. |
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Post by bourneendboy on May 6, 2019 7:29:04 GMT
Although, isn't using Bubble accessing my phone storage doing the same job?
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Post by MartinT on May 6, 2019 7:37:58 GMT
A phone is serving the files over wi-fi, a NAS is on cable ethernet to the router. Much better for sound quality.
I bought a used 1TB Western Digital NAS for not a lot of money on eBay. Turned out to be 2TB and the owner had hardly used it.
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Post by Pinch on May 6, 2019 7:44:07 GMT
Although, isn't using Bubble accessing my phone storage doing the same job? Yup - same job, just a different way of doing it. For me, my library is too big to fit on any kind of phone storage, so that wouldn't be an option. And I'd need to maintain a library on a computer anyway, to take care of all file management duties, so it makes sense to also use that machine for playback. The music server actually needn't be a Pi - any old laptop or desktop would do fine. I went for a second Pi because it's a nice low-power option, but if you're already in a situation where you have a laptop or desktop that's more or less always on then you could just use that. |
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Post by Pinch on May 6, 2019 8:06:18 GMT
I should also say that, on the server side, there are a lot of software options - I like JRiver because of its powerful library management features, and the smartphone app for controlling playback is pretty nice (much nicer than using Volumio or Moode directly). But it's not free (I think around $30) whereas other packages (like, say, Plex) are. |
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on May 6, 2019 8:14:55 GMT
Although, isn't using Bubble accessing my phone storage doing the same job? In a way it is doing a similar job. But.... It is likely to be using the DLNA protocol (Digital Living Network Alliance). This is very good for playing media of all sorts across all sorts of platform.... It is excellent at giving universal access to things... for example, from a smart telly However, the universal openness can come at a cost, For example it is quite possible to play files in formats which are not supported by a limited/primitive playback device. It does that by transcoding on the fly. So for example, if you want to playback FLAC files on a device which cannot play FLAC files, the DLNA server might helpfully transcode the FLAC to mp3 on the fly so that is magically playbacks without further ado. Similar things happen for video formats. This is brilliant for interoperability, but not ideal for "HiFi" where we do our best to maintain bit perfect playback from start to finish. Cheers Sean |
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Post by Pinch on May 6, 2019 8:52:25 GMT
This^ is a good point - for example, a Pi running Volimuo will not playback .ape files unless they're transcoded on the fly. But both Volumio and Moode (and presumably others) will at least play flacs without any trouble. Transcoding can be set at the server side, so you can at least ensure that all lossless formats which can be played by your device will be played losslessly (plus it's no trouble converting, say, ape to flac, so in principle everything should be available).
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Post by bourneendboy on May 6, 2019 9:13:45 GMT
So if I were to use another Pi, I would use Jriver or Plex, plug the Pi into my router, can I then stream wirelessly to my playback Pi? Can I still use Volumio and do I then set up the streaming Pi as a NAS within Volumio?
Thanks fellas!
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Post by Pinch on May 6, 2019 9:44:26 GMT
So if I were to use another Pi, I would use Jriver or Plex, plug the Pi into my router, can I then stream wirelessly to my playback Pi? Yes. The playback Pi would run Volumio, but you wouldn't use Volumio's web gui to control playback - library browsing and playback would be controlled by either the JRiver app or the Plex app on a smartphone or tablet (or JRiver also hase a web gui). Once everything is set up you wouldn't have to interact directly with Volumio for day-to-day use. Can I still use Volumio and do I then set up the streaming Pi as a NAS within Volumio? This is potentially another option: It would be possible to set up a second Pi with an external drive as a NAS drive, and then just use Volumio directly as you describe. I haven't experimented with this, but it should work just fine (google: pi nas). |
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Post by bourneendboy on May 6, 2019 10:06:59 GMT
Thanks Pinch! Using the Pi as a NAS and setting up within Volumio is my preferred option - will investigate this further.
Edit - I'm going to go with this, thanks for all your advice chaps, much appreciated!
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