Can Volumio help improve my current set up?

[danny_bhoy67]

Hi all,

At the moment I have a bit of a rudimentary set up with my Raspberry Pi to serve music from an external HDD to my UPnP enabled stereo streamer that is connected to my main stereo set up in the house. I am using a combination of MiniDLNA and samba shares to send music from my laptop, to the external HDD and then have all of that served to my streamer via UPnP. The problem is that is can be quite clunky, the indexes often need manually rebuilt to find new albums and just isn’t very slick.

I’m always looking for ways to improve this set up. I’m relatively techie and can usually troubleshoot any issues quite quickly, however, my father in law uses the same set up and I often find myself on the phone to him reminding him how it works and telling him how to rebuild the minidnla database! Something a bit user friendly would be ideal.

So I’m hoping Volumio might offer a solution. Here is what I require and I would appreciate if someone could tell me if Volumio would be a good solution or if I’m barking up the wrong tree, I appreciate that it is designed to play music physically through a sound system as opposed to serving it, but the look of the apps and webui got me thinking…

• I’d like to have my Pi, running Volumio, to have an external usb HDD plugged into it and then physically wired into my router via ethernet.
• I’d then like to be able to access Volumio from an app or the webui using any combination of smartphone, laptop or tablet and be able to access, view and hopefully add to my library and have the indexes update seamlessly for each new album I add. I appreciate the initial creation of the indexes will be slow with a big chunk of music going on there.
• I’d like my stereo’s streamer to be able to access all of my library through it’s own interface (via UPnp) and play the music wirelessly.
• I’d like to be able to play my music through an app or the webui by selecting the track or album I want. I can do this using bubbleupnp on my phone at the moment, but my father in law struggles to grasp it.
• I’d like to be able to access my Volumio library and configurations outwith my home network

I appreciate any advice you can give. Is Volumio designed to do what I am asking for? Would I be better just trying to improve my current MininDNLA solution?

Thanks again!

[joda2]

@danny_bhoy67

I’d like to have my Pi, running Volumio, to have an external usb HDD plugged into it and then physically wired into my router via ethernet.

Possible

@danny_bhoy67

I’d then like to be able to access Volumio from an app or the webui using any combination of smartphone, laptop or tablet and be able to access, view and hopefully add to my library and have the indexes update seamlessly for each new album I add. I appreciate the initial creation of the indexes will be slow with a big chunk of music going on there.

Possible, but the upload speed over the network is not really good. You should turn of your pi, connect your HDD to your pc and copy the music. After that mpd will rescan your entire HDD (and this will take a lot of time if you have a big music collection)

@danny_bhoy67

I’d like my stereo’s streamer to be able to access all of my library through it’s own interface (via UPnp) and play the music wirelessly.

Should be possible, never tried it myself.

@danny_bhoy67

I’d like to be able to play my music through an app or the webui by selecting the track or album I want. I can do this using bubbleupnp on my phone at the moment, but my father in law struggles to grasp it.

Yep possible. Smartphone, Tablet, PC or Laptop. Every device which has a browser can do that.

@danny_bhoy67

I’d like to be able to access my Volumio library and configurations outwith my home network[/list]

Should be possible, but very risky. The Volumio web UI is not secured with a password.

My Opinion: try it, you only need a SD card and some time (not really much)