You have your Raspberry Pi sitting in your media center running Volumio, so that you can listen to your music through your stereo. Attached to your Pi is a USB hard drive or flash drive containing your music. But you are currently in the other room on your PC. How do you listen to all that music that is on your Pi?
You could set up a NAS server on your Pi, and play the songs one by one. Or you could set up a steaming server under Volumio that can handle playlists. Let me introduce you to CherryMusic. http://www.fomori.org/cherrymusic/
CherryMusic is a browser based music streamer written in Python. It is small and fast enough to work well on Pi, and it works well on Volumio.
The instructions for installing CherryMusic can be found here:
http://www.fomori.org/cherrymusic/Setup%20Guide.html#quickstart
but I’ll go through the installation onto Volumio step by step.
-
Download CherryMusic, and some other necessary files
Logon to root (default password is volumio).
cd /home
apt-get update && apt-get install git-core
git clone -b master https://github.com/devsnd/cherrymusic.git
apt-get install imagemagick
apt-get install vorbis-tools lame flac -
Startup:
cd ./cherrymusic
python cherrymusic --setup --port 8080
It should ask you to install “Download cherrypy now? (y/n)”. Just type y -
Setup: In your local PC browser, type:
http://volumio:8080
Under “Media base directory” you need to put the directory that your music is located in. It should be either
/mnt/USB or /mnt/NAS -
Finish: To have CherryMusic start on reboot
crontab –e
and add this line at the end
@reboot python /home/cherrymusic/cherrymusic &
Comments:
Yes, the Pi is powerful enough to play music on the Pi using Volumio, and stream music from the Pi using CherryMusic at the same time. It does sometime stutter on FLAC transcoding. Just let it buffer a few seconds and it will be solid.
Yes, the CherryMusic playlists will be different from the Volumio playlists.
Yes, there are other web based music streamers, like Groove Basin, but I had a lot more problems getting those to work with Volumio, or work on the Pi at all.