I’m brand new to Volumio and I’m having a bit of trouble with it. I’ve installed Volumio onto an SD card and installed it in my Raspberry Pi 2, configured it to connect wirelessly to my local network and I can access the WebUI from my PC. There’s only one (rather large!) problem, I can’t see any of my music in the WebUI! I’m clearly missing something fairly fundamental here (but I haven’t yet found a step-by-step guide to refer to - is there one?). I’ve connected a USB hard drive to the RPi and if I SSH into the RPi from my PC and look at the file system I can see that it’s been automounted just fine and I can cd into it and see various folders that contain music. So how to I tell Volumio to look into these folders for my music?
OK, so Volumio has found music on my HDD but it’s only found a tiny fraction of what’s on there (I have some 40,000 files). Admittedly, the organisation of my files is not great. So, my questions are:
Are there any rules about how files and folders should be organised?
Are there any tools in Volumio for tagging files?
How do I tell Volumio where to look on my HDD for music? (The HDD is 4 TB in size and only some of what’s on there is music.)
How does Volumio store library information? Can I ask Volumio to clear its library and start again?
Hi, when booting Volumio for the first time there are a lot of things that need to be set. I can imagine scanning all your files to determine whether it should be included and then write it to the database just takes a while on the Pi?
If you ever want to improve your library, you might try one of the following options:
OK, I’m fairly new to Volumio as well, but let me try, based on what I’ve found already:
I don’t think so, as I believe the mpd backend scans the complete directory tree down from it’s mount point.
However, Volumio is based on Linux which uses the user and/or group as a security mechanism to determine if it can read a particular file of directory. So, if the files on the HD have Linux permissions that stop the volumio/mpd user from reading them, they won’t appear in the library.
No. That I know of.
Apart from network mounted drives, you don’t. If you mount a USB drive, that will be auto-mounted in the correct place for Volumio to search for music, and it will search the complete drive, with the file permissions issue I mentioned earlier.
If you search your network, from a Windows (or other OS), you should see a share under Volumio called “Internal Storage”. You can drag files to that, which will then be stored on the MicroSD card that you booted Volumio from.
Kind of. Under the settings for “My Music” there is an “Update” and “Rescan” button. “Rescan” should do what you want.
Using “Internal Storage”, I found that Volumio didn’t recognise that any files had been put there the first time until I did a “Rescan”. You might have to do that after mounting a USB HD. Not sure, as I haven’t tried it. But you did say that some files were found, which implies it isn’t.
Thanks for the replies so far. I actually found that rebooting the RPi sorted a lot of the issues out, and now my full library is shown. However, it did take a good few hours after the reboot for the database to be rebuilt completely (but I have quite a few music files). I saw that Volumio has a Samba-enabled folder called “Internal Storage”. I copied some music files there and clicked “Update” but for some reason they don’t show up in my library and if I go to “Music Library” > “INTERNAL” within the Volumio WebUI then they don’t show up there, even though they’re definitely there. Any ideas, anyone? When copying files over to the “Internal Storage” folder (or, for example, using SFTP to upload files from my PC to the USB HDD attached to the RPi), should I only use “Update” and not “Rescan”? (Some tooltips for these buttons would be helpful!)
My next step is to Samba-enable the main music folder on the HDD attached the RPi and then point the media player that I use on my PC (JRiver) to this folder so that I can both access the files if I want to copy music to my portable music player and automatically add music to Volumio when I rip CDs. Anyone had any issues that I should be aware of here?
“Update” will look for updated (changed/added/deleted) files since the last Update/Rescan in order to update the library with just those changes.
“Rescan” will also look at files that haven’t been updated since the last Update/Rescan so is effectively a library re-build.
I’m not 100% certain, but I think that the first time you add anything to “Internal Storage” you have to do a “Rescan”, because there will be no indication in the library that there are any files there, so it won’t look for “Updates”.
If the files are definitely in the right location, but aren’t being seen, then it could be a Linux permissions issue. If you SSH to Volumio, what does an “ls -l” show for the individual file permissions.
I did check the permissions and they look fine (rwx for everyone). I do see that the “INTERNAL” directory is owned by root and not volumio, but I presume this is normal?
What I have found is that it just takes a very, very long time (4+ hours!) for files that are added to “INTERNAL” to show up in the Volumio WebUI after the the “Update” button is pressed. Is this normal??? Is there a quick way to add files to the Volumio music library?
Now the principal HDD I’m using with Volumio is quite big (4 TB, as I recall). Furthermore, in addition to music, I store a lot of other stuff on there, so I’m wondering if this is slowing the indexing/updating down to the point that it’s essentially unusable?
And another thing: if I restart Volumio then it take aeons (hours!) before the library shows up again in the WebUI, rendering the system unusable until then.
