Hi! I’m relatively new to Volumio (about a year) and I am now running Volumio 3 on a Raspberry Pi 4 with my entire music collection on a USB3 stick in the top USB3 port on the Pi and use a USB2 output to an external DAC and amplifier. I am running “plain vanilla” with no multi room playback or add-ons.
I want to say at the outset that I think this is a fabulous music player and I am not registering a “complaint.” I am mostly just trying to gain some insight into the workings of the player. I am a rank novice with most things related to Linux / Debian, and I am barely functional in using SSH, although I consider myself reasonably computer literate.
I always access the UI through a browser from a PC. If I am playing music and then hit pause and don’t restart the music for about an hour or more the UI no longer responds to a number of commands. Most importantly, it will not resume playing when I hit the “Play” icon. I can have it display all my album covers, but it will not open a list of tracks on any album and it will not load any Web Radio stations or music tracks.
I can reach the “Settings” menu, though, and I have found that if the first thing I do when trying to resume playback is to go to Settings/Playback Options/Output Device and click “Save” (without making any changes) this restarts the MPD (“Player Successfully Restarted” message) and then I can resume playback.
I have tried to research this issue and found that other users have had similar concerns, even with earlier releases of Volumio, and I also run a different RPi under the moOde OS, and amazingly, it has the same problem. This leads me to believe that either there is some “universal” problem with the MPD or with the way my network is set up. It’s as if the MPD or the RPi somehow partially “locks up” when not accessed for an hour or more if it is not actively playing music.
Universally, a cold reboot always seems to restore the unit, as does restarting the MPD before issuing any other request. Now, I cannot imagine that this happens to everyone, as there would be thousands of complaints, so I’m trying to determine what is different in my setup from the thousands of other happy users.
Can anyone offer some ideas why this is happening to me and a number of other users? Many thanks in advance!
That’s odd. With a network issue I would have expected that the system would be unreachable, but this is not the case with your system. Assuming you are using wifi, is it possible to test if this still happens when connecting the Pi with and ethernet cable?
Yeah, I’m an old school guy and I don’t trust that new-fangled Wi-Fi stuff much (LOL). The majority of my home network is hard-wired and it is the only way I have ever connected my Raspberry Pi devices to the network. I use a static I.P. address also. Thank you for looking at this for me! Tommy.
I played around with changing power supplies and even changing the RPi itself, but the behavior is the same in all cases.
This morning after the unit was idle for about 2 hours I started a log session before hitting “Play” and here is what I captured.
The Volumio did not start play
volumio : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/sbin/ifconfig eth0
pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root
volumio : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/sbin/ifconfig wlan0
pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root
Then, I captured what happens when I try to list an album’s tracks from the “Albums” page. The green progress bar scoots across the top until a millimeter from the end and then it stops. No tracks are ever displayed.
Starting Live Log…
---------------------------- MPD announces system playlist update
info: Ignoring MPD Status Update
info: sendMpdCommand clear took 1 milliseconds
error: updateQueue error: null
info: ------------------------------ 3ms
info: CALLMETHOD: system_controller system enableLiveLog true
info: CoreCommandRouter::executeOnPlugin: system , enableLiveLog
info: Launching a new LiveLog session
info: Killing previous LiveLog session
process exited with code nullinfo: Live Log process terminated: null
info: CoreCommandRouter::executeOnPlugin: mpd , handleBrowseUri
info: CURURI: albums://
info: listAlbums - loading Albums from cache
info: CoreCommandRouter::volumioGetQueue
info: CoreStateMachine::getQueue
info: CorePlayQueue::getQueue
info: CoreCommandRouter::executeOnPlugin: mpd , handleBrowseUri
info: CURURI: albums://Adele/19
I know from past experience, if I immediately go to “Settings/Playback Options/Audio Output” and hit “Save” the MPD restarts with the message on the top right of the screen and then everything works.
Adding a bit more information from observations. If I do NOT restart the MPD as the very first action I take after a long pause, as I have stated, the UI ignores a “play” request or a request to display the tracks of an album, or a request to clear the Queue, but after a request like that, if I let it just sit with that unanswered request for 5 to 10 minutes, it will eventually become responsive again and I can then get it to start playing again.