Connecting a USB drive to a Raspberry Pi 4 with Volumio - directory recognized, content not

Help and Support
#1

Dear all,

I want to simplify my streaming setup and ideally just connect a 500GB USB drive with music to my Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) running Volumio.

As a first try, I plugged in a 4GB USB stick with some music on it, and Volumio recognized the type (brand) of the USB stick correctly, as well as the main directory (music/), but that directory then shows up as empty, even though it contains another directory (artist/) with a subdirectory (album/) containing the actual music files.

Anyone have an idea what’s going on?

#2

It’s usually the files system that’s the issue. Format the 500 GB drive as FAT32, copy your music to it and plug it into the R Pi. That should sort it out.

#3

I also have an RPI 4+ and I connect a 2TB external drive via USB 3.0. The disk is formatted as NTFS and is recognized by Volumio without any problem. But the first time I connect it it may take 2 hours to index it. While indexing it, any attempt to access the Music Library usually indicates that nothing is connected.
You can follow the indexing process from “Sources”. Also accessing the RPI with Putty, for example. With the TOP command we can see the activity of the RPI, in my case the system is not available to consult music and play until the activity of all processes is limited to 0.3% of CPU.

Once completed, in successive startups I need 7 minutes before Volumio is available (5 minutes to retrieve the music library, although I imagine it will depend on the number of files; 130,000 in my case)

#4

When you ran top, did you notice if it was the node process that was consuming most resources? Or was it mpd.

My spidey senses (and this Pi Zero W unresponsive ) is making me believe that we might have a memory leak somewhere in the indexing logic.

#5

Many thanks, @pwstereo, this did the trick!