Improvements for large music-base owners

Volumio Development Suggest a feature
#1

When you are a paying user of Volumio, you might expect some support and/or responses to posts. But hey, my keyboard is very patient. So here we go:

  1. Make Volumio boot from USB on Raspberry Pi devices. (the bootcode.bin option could be something you can look into!)
  2. If there is a large stack of music, and the user uses NFS, why don’t you store the Database on that NFS? First of all, this will be there, still after a crash of the Volumio Pi, and it saves users like me, a lot of time to “re-scan” the files and re-fill the database. (Which takes about 6 hours for MY music archive!)
  3. Make an option where you can actually choose where you want to store your configs? NFS/USB/Whatever. This way, you make re-installations a lot more easy.

Why these suggestions? Now, everytime I add new songs to my stash of music, and do a rescan, that ends up in a full re-install of the Volumio SD card, and start with a full scan of my stash. If I don’t do it this way, I end up with a frozen, unwilling to restart Volumio system.

For your info: Above happens on:

  • Pi Zero W
  • Pi 3B+
  • Pi 4 4GB

So, this is not an issue with the hardware. This is truly a design issue.
Please fix this?

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#2

You are not paying to use Volumio, it is free to use. I am sorry that your questions were not answered on the forums; please remember that this is a Community effort to make Volumio a better experience for the Community.

This is a niche request, and you offer no reasons to make it so. Whilst it is possible in Raspbian, it is not clear to me what advantages it would offer that make the development time worth while.

Most people don’t use NFS. As to saving a copy of the database to a remote location, that sounds like a good idea, probably best achieved via a plugin.

There is a ‘backup’ plugin available currently, see Volumio Plugins Collection. This does not include music database, but probably could be extended to do so.

#3

Thank you for your reply.

To clear stuff up: I will give you some answers to your questions.

  1. The reason for having to boot from USB, are a couple:
  • Faster booting (Obvious)
  • Faster reading of the configurations and databases at startup. (Takes my system about 15 minutes to fully boot up and have the web-pages available)
  • Possibility to use “swap” because an USB attached SSD will not wear out as fast from that. (Obvious when you have large sets of music, like me).
  • Not needing NFS/SMB, because then people like me, can store music on the Volumio system. (Yep, 1 TB of FLAC does not fit on a SD card, right?)
  • I might not be the only one who likes this option.

  1. NFS, ok, that also includes SMB. So, Network-attached storage. Yes, great idea.

  2. If you can choose where the configuration is stored, you can actually use “faster” storage than the SD card, which will speed up booting. (and/or adding music to your stash). I consider the database with info used by Volumio part of the “configuration”.

So, I hope that this clears stuff up?

#4

Have you investigated why “Takes my system about 15 minutes to fully boot up and have the web-pages available”? What is Volumio doing during this time period? Is it actually a boot issue?

#5

Is there are reason you are doing a rescan instead of an update? A rescan will reindex your entire library. An update will just add the new tracks.

You can use a USB drive for this.

#6

Yes, I did investigate that long bootup time. And it is mainly caused by reading the databases.

#7

I do the rescan, because, during an update, nothing happens. (Not even after 24 hours). Therefore I am forced to do a rescan. Of about 300.000+ tracks. (Yes, all legal. And yes, including an extensive set of 78 rpm records)

And why should I have to use both SD and USB? Why not just simply one device, that can be put in to RAID1 mode, for example? (Fantec X-series with SSD drives).

But I guess that that is way to sophisticated, and exotic for most users, right?

#8

I also use NAS/Synology as my music storage … and have multiple Volumio so having the DB on the remote storage could be used by all Volumio instances (yes, I know then you need DB record locking or locking on updates)

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#9

Hello guys, I also use multiple instances of Volumio in my house and I have all music files stored on my Synology NAS.

It would be a great feature to have the database located on the NAS or to another LAN location so all the Volumio instances will be able to share it.

In the past I did it with Kodi and a mysql db and it works great!

2 Likes
#10

Because that’s not what you asked for. You wanted a way to not use NFS/SMB because 1TB of data does not fit on an SD card.

I’m not familiar with Fantec NAS systems. Can it run Docker? I believe there have been some unofficial ports of Volumio to docker containers which may get you some of the functionality you are looking for.

#11

Will not this be solved on the PI4 when they make a usb option on the eeprom as that would do away with the bootcode.bin? :thinking: :man_shrugging:

That would be a great time saver. I too have a large music collection (220,000+ tracks) on many terrabytes and sometimes it just gets stuck requiring a reboot after 3days of trying which looses ALL the work it has done on the database. (Maybe being able to stop an update/rescan before rebooting would be handy?) (I use a Seagate Personal Cloud with 5usb hard drives daisy chained to it)

Thanks for all your hard work guys. :wink: :+1:

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