Help with setting up my Music Library on multiple USB Sticks

Help and Support
#1

I envisage that my Music Library (FLAC) will require a Terrabyte or more in total and I would like to split it between multiple USB Sticks.

Will Volumio catalogue and index the multi-stick library seamlessly as a single indexed library, allowing me to select by artist, genre, trackname etc. across all of the USB Sticks?

I realise that the simplest way would be to use a single Disk in a USB attached Caddy but with the price point for 128GB SD Cards or Sticks now at around the £10 mark, this has to be a viable alternative.

R

#2

Interesting idea, and something that I have not tried. I suspect that all your cards/sticks should be catalogued ok. Why not start simple and test the waters first with 2 or 3 sticks/cards that you already have lying about? Let us know the results …

#3

OK, I spread some music tracks across three Sticks and also nested them in folders and folders within folders on each stick. Here are my observations:

  1. Music Library: I have to navigate through the listed Sticks and Folders to find my tracks. This is what I expected

  2. When accessing Music by Artist or Genre, the list appears in alphabetical order, catalogued seamlessly across all of the sticks, Folders and subfolders. This is a very pleasant surprise!

  3. When accesssing by Album, the list is again catalogued seamlessly across all of the sticks, Folders and subfolders but the Album Names do not seem to be in any discernable order. It would be nice if they were in alphabetic order but it’s no big deal.

There is a bit of latency when switching between modes but that is probably because I am currently running Volumio on a Raspberry Pi 2B. I expect that this will be much less noticeable on a Pi 4.

I have another question for you seasoned users but will raise that in a separate thread.

Robin

#4

Well, good start anyway :wink:

#5

You can hook up an external drive, SSD or hdd instead of USB thumb drives. Price per Gb should be better.
Or do you use multiple Raspberry pi’s? Then you could share the storage over your network and mount on one of the other devices.

#6

Are you suggesting a second RPi running Raspbian? …could share its USB attached data dtives over the network with Volumio? That would seem like an excellent solution.

Alternatively, is there a better OS or package which would turn a RPi into an efficient NAS Server?

Robin

#7

Loads of posts out there (Web) about using RPis as a NAS.