Probably a stupid question- but given the RPi is capable of running Volumio and is also capable of acting as a NAS server is it not possible to combine the 2 functionalities???
Ie. Just plug in an external hard drive to the RPi and set that up as my NAS with all my music on and then use the Volumio capabilities to play it through my amp?
Anyone tried this? Am I going down a stupid root? I’m guessing the limitation would be the RPi processing capabilities but the opportunity to run 1 box instead of 2 is very tempting.
Not a stupid question at all - but there may be several answers.
Simplest is that you can plug in a USB drive (thumb drive / USB hard disk or whatever) in the Pi, reindex MPD and Volumio will be able to access and play that music once MPD has completed it’s indexing (which may take some time). This I do.
If you also want to share that music out to other network attached devices then this may be a little more complicated. Certainly it should be possible to create a CIFS/SAMBA share form the hard disk enabled Pi and then have other volume clients access this CIFS share, indexing the music on each Pi via MPD. This I have not tried.
I am not sure (today) if you could create a NAS like UPnP visible solution to the rest of the network within the same Pi but it’s only software so technically it’s possible.
Hosting 24/192 audio on a NAS and having multiple targets across the network read and consume that media will certainly increase CPU overhead which if the local “NAS” Pi is also playing such high rate media may reduce available CPU for playback, potentially causing gaps in music and stuttering. Basic mp3 should I guess be fine.
It has already been done. Just upgrade to Volumio 1.5
I am currently looking at the \Volumio\USB Music\ share.
I wouldn’t use this to backup any huge files while the music is playing on Volumio; but it is nice to add, remove, manage, and stream songs that are on the USB hard drive without removing it from the Volumio system. There are also a \Volumio\Ramplay\ share for the SD card, and a \Volumio\WebRadio\ share to add .pls and .m3u files to the WebRadio streaming playlist. Very Nice.