I have been running Volumio for several weeks now on a Pi4 with HiFiBerry DAC+Pro. All is well.
There are a few things I’m working on making work better, but it is working well enough I’m looking to expand the system.
Please tell me if this should work the way I imagine before I sink a lot of time and a few more $ into it.
First I will upgrade to Virtuoso to allow for multiple devices.
Next I would build (2) more devices- I’m planning to use Pi3 with HiFiBerry Amp2.
the Amp2 is described as a DAC+ with integrated amp.
I have 2 pair of speakers laying around that I plan to use with these.
I’m not (for now) concerned with synchronous sound in multiple rooms, just to be able to have music in multiple parts of the house.
Now the big question- Will the remote devices have access to my music library which is on USB drive mounted to the current Pi4 system? If not, would a NAS solve that?
Volumio exposes the local USB drive as an SMB share, so I’d imagine a second and third Volumio installation could use that share in the same way it would use an SMB share on a NAS.
UPDATED Question:
In another thread I saw where a user who was upgrading to Superstar was advised to cancel his Virtuoso account and start a new account as Superstar. Is this correct? If so, and I do that, will it solve my problem of old playlists I can’t get rid of? I’m guessing they would go dormant along with the cancelled account.
If I have that correct I’ll stop worrying about the playlists as it will resolve anyway.
I have three Volumio systems as you describe - 1 with Hifiberry DAC, USB hard disk, into a standalone amp to drive the living room speakers, and two others with Hifiberry AMPs driving old speakers, one system in the loft and one in the bathroom. It works fine, you can’t synchronise playback in all three zones (unless you upgrade the MyVolumio) but you can play different things all running off the same USB hard disk. The systems are all aware of each other too so you switch between playback zones in the UI.
I’m in the process of getting a paid MyVolumio account though, mainly so I can stream Tidal stuff in addition to my USB of ripped CDs.
So far so good. I have all three units working.
Pi4 HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro SSD library on USB “Volumio”
Pi3 HiFiBerry Amp2 “Volumio2”
Pi3 HiFiBerry Amp2 “Volumio3”
I am able to play Webradio from all three so that much is good.
Now I would like to be able to access the library from Volumio2 & Volumio3.
I’ve tried adding the USB drive as a NAS in the Sources menu.
I’m really just faking my way here so if this is the wrong approach please point me in the right direction.
I used the IP address for Volumio and the mount location of the USB as the path.
I’ve checked the documentation and I don’t see specifics. I tried the “auto detect” and it didn’t see any networked drives.
I can see the drive from my laptop on the network so I know its accessible. I just need to know how to tell volumio on the new devices where to find it.
Thanks for the reply. I’ve been working with your recommendation and still no luck.
I’m sure its something simple but my lack of experience with network file systems is hanging me up.
Does it matter if I have named the device something other than “volumio”? Does that figure into the path? Or is that just within Volumio2 UI?
You said the name of each in your post above I thought. Volumio, Volumio2, and Volumio3.
Yes, of course it matters, you have to use the actual name in the path to the share.
If yours is called pumpkinrocketsaladsprout, then the path would be
\\pumpkinrocketsaladsprout\usb\music or whatever your music folder is.
Thanks - I’m not having success. Sorry if my question about naming muddied the waters.
VolumioLib is the directory on the USB drive where music is stored. “volumio” is the name of the Pi4 device where the USB drive is mounted. I can use volumio.local to get to the UI for this device. volumio2.local for the second and volumio3.local for the third devices.
so based on previous posts I would think \volumio\usb\VolumioLib should be the correct path.
and I should be able to set it up and access as NAS from volumio2 and volumio3.
I’ve been giving it alias of HomeLibrary on the first line, then
172.16.1.xxx on the second (IP address if volumio)
I give the path as \volumio\usb\VolumioLib and hit save.
it shows as
\172.16.1.xxx\volumio\usb\VolumioLib (which makes sense to me as the path to the directory)
but I get an “error in mounting share HomeLibrary”. “no such directory”.
Sorry if my inexperience is causing frustration. I’m pretty certain the answer will be simple when I find it. Appreciate all the help.
If there is a way to set this up through ssh, I’m happy to give that a try.
Surely your share is in the directory /mnt/USB? And it will apear as a share name as “VolumioLib”, so I would expect your path to simply be “/VolumioLib” or maybe without the forward slash.
In the smb.conf file under the USB section the path is shown as /mnt/USB
Looking through the directories I can find two paths to VolumioLib-
it shows up in /mnt/USB/VolumioLib
also in /media/VolumioLib
Based on chsims1 suggestion I went into settings again on volumio2.
I tried the path of just VolumioLib with and without the forward slash
all else was as described above
still no success
Is it possible to manually edit the NAS section of the smb.conf file on volumio2 and volumio3 to show the path to the share? what would that format be given my set up described?
/172.16.1.xxx/media/VolumioLib ?
Finally got a chance to work through the various options in a methodical way.
The solution turned out to be somewhere between the suggestions from pwstereo and chsims1.
usb/VolumioLib
no leading “volumio” but including “usb” with no leading forward slash.
For the record this was done through the sources settings not ssh.
I now have volumio2 reading the library mounted to volumio. On to volumio3!
thanks for everyone’s patience. you were a big help.