Volumio 3.5 Supersearch and Infinity Playback Public Beta Testing

Dear Volumiophiles,
following the recent widespread commotion about Artificial Intelligence and how disruptive\frightening\cool\whatever everyone thought this is, we at Volumio got thinking how we could use this technology to enhance our listening sessions experience.

So we got to work and in the last 2 months we crafted what we think might be a valuable addition to Volumio’s offering.

For the curious among you: yes, we have integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology into Volumio :wink:

This is what is all about:

Supersearch

This is a search mode, alternative to regular search, that allows you to type a question like input. Something like:

  • Summer disco dance
  • Italian funk
  • Songs for sunny sunday

Or like you were requesting to play music to a friend or a shop clerk. While the results are not 100% accurate, we believe it’s a great way to discover new music or create tailored playlists.

To enable Supersearch, simply head to search and toggle the ordinary\supersearch toggle switch.

The results from the search query are interpreted by AI and will result on a list of tracks that Volumio will match with your library (local files, tidal, qobuz, spotify etc) and present only the available tracks.

This means, that to have optimal results with Supersearch (and all the other goodies in this release) is suggested to have at least one streaming service enabled (spotify, tidal, qobuz) and a local music library of at least 1000 tracks.

RELATED ARTISTS AND ALBUMS

Easy as it sounds. When browsing your artists and albums, we present you with related artists and albums. This is to further enhance “The music rabbit hole” experience.

When you then select a related Artist or Album, if they are to be found in your library (again streaming or local) you can directly browse them.

INFINITY PLAYBACK

This has been one of the most requested features during these years. Some call it “Random Playback” some others “Radios”. This is what we came up with.

If you enable Infinity Playback, when you get to the end of your queue, Volumio will load approximately 10 new tracks which are related from your library (streaming or local). So you can end up with an endless list of similar tracks.

Personally, this has been our favourite addition so far. We discovered a ton of new music and we got music playing all day thanks to it.

Infinity Playback can be enabled by clicking on the “Infinity” Icon on playback page

Or by cycling trough repeat options in the queue menu:

Tweaking of Artist and Album presentation

We took the chance to do a slight redesign of the artist and album presentations, to offer a less cluttered and more optimized view.

All the new features above, except the artist and album presentation, are available ONLY for Volumio Premium users.

Why a beta testing

We are now very happy on how the overall result came along. But as always, before releasing it to the public, we are keen to receive your feedbacks.
Especially we are keen to understand:

  • Is the presentation of the features intuitive? If not, let us know what you struggle with and ideally a suggestion on how to make it more intuitive.
  • Is it adding value to your listening experience?
  • Are you experiencing issues? If yes, please let us know what is the issue and please paste a log for us to troubleshoot.

On top of that, AI (we use OpenAI APIs) can be a really expensive piece of tech to pay for, so we are keen to understand if the costs that we will incur make sense considering the value you guys get from this.

How to try it

Simply put your device in TEST MODE and update to any version from 3.502 onwards

ENJOY!

10 Likes

Thanks Team Volumio!!!

Great addition !!! Just make sure that browser users clear their cache to make the new feature available. At least using chrome didn’t appear until I cleared it.

Thanks
Damian

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Great addition. Since I’m a Volumio Primo user I’m not keen to /dev and beta updates anymore, but I’m eager to use it, when it gets into a final release.
A great use for AI, in my humble opinion.

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Thanks, I noticed this feature the other week but didn’t appear to do anything so keen to try it again in test mode. Not sure how that goes on the Mobile app but can try windows. On virtuoso so hopefully not just a premium feature. Sounds like the smarts we want, similar to room, which can integrate your own library and streaming services.

PS rest mode is just running it in another dev tab in chrome I assume.

Cheers

I’ve updated as well, openend Volumio in a different browser on my iOS device and they show up. It’s too bad but theses features cannot be activated on our Virtuoso license :pleading_face:

Oh right, that’s a shame I won’t bother testing it. It did seem like a premium feature.

The tidal algorithm for radio mode is pretty sweet anyway using Tidal connect.

ps. I wouldn’t pay for premium if the simple search function doesn’t work properly. Still issues with VA albums - returns all the tracks as separate albums and doesn’t play continuously (like you’d expect, similar to Foobar).

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Try using supersearch without streaming services but 17500 tracks on NAS.

Tried several searches (Female, New Wave, Disco, etc)
“Female” gave me 4 results (I have about 500 songs with female singers)
“New Wave” gave me 25 results the first time, then nothing

I just don’t understand why it works (a little) then not at all.
Maybe too many tracks and timeout

That’s my thoughts for today

temperamental most of the time with certain plugins and stuff.
The web page player showing old now playing info for some reason. Probably good not to do the updates once it’s working I guess.

I’ve only got Virtuoso. Wonder if the supersearch fixes the issues with VA (various artists) albums searching:
eg. search for ‘cafe del mar’… found 147 albums. hit play on the first one… stops after first track.
something has never been right with the treatment of these albums. My tags are all correct.
foobar works way better, with they would update it and have an app & cast to device or something.

Any way to rollback 3.502? Seem to need a lot of reboots these days.
Cheers,

Nothing to do with supersearch, but this version creates multiple duplicate songs on same album.
I had to rollback to get something playable.

I am sorry, but this is a Premium only feature. The main reason is due to the high cost of OpenAi’s API, which we cannot afford on Virtuoso alone…
But, since you are loyal customers, it would be good to reward you… Would you guys be interested in a very discounted upgrade path to Premium from Virtuoso?

Would it be possibile for you to send a log (paste link here) when a search fails after being completed once?

@G-rig
This is possibly some bug introduced with the new release. To fix this, it would be extremely useful if you could send one log just when the issue occurs, and paste the link here

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Yes, I’m interested!

Guys, it’s annoying, with each of the last updates, my Primo no longer finds the network. Only after several restarts does it works again. After today’s update, I think it was 3,505, the message “the server is not responding” comes up again.Several restarts didn`t helped. :nauseated_face: Don’t mess around with any silly gimmicks, create a stable system to just listen to MUSIC. You are still driving me to roon…

5th reboot… back online… grrrrrr

If you want a stable system, why do you then update it with beta releases?

because I trust the Volumio guys and the update ad doesn’t say anything about beta guinea pigs :slight_smile: