volumio3 Archives - Volumio The Music Player Tue, 11 Oct 2022 10:58:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://volumio.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cropped-volumio-icon-32x32.png volumio3 Archives - Volumio 32 32 Introducing Volumio UNIVERSAL https://volumio.com/en/introducing-volumio-universal/ https://volumio.com/en/introducing-volumio-universal/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2022 13:43:26 +0000 https://volumio.com/?p=31176 Volumio’s main focus was and it’s always going to be providing the best sound quality possible. This goes for every

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Volumio’s main focus was and it’s always going to be providing the best sound quality possible. This goes for every software development we do and all the current and upcoming products we offer. But we feel we can do more and for a wider audience. Volumio, as it is today, can become the One-Stop-Shop for ALL music lovers.

VOLUMIO 3.3 UNIVERSAL IS HERE

What does it mean by ALL music lovers? We thought that the values audiophiles believe in, can be of great enjoyment also to a wider music community.  This is why we are introducing our newest release, Volumio 3.3, as Volumio UNIVERSAL. We added new features that give the ability to use our music player in many new playback devices available in the market, both increasing convenience of Volumio as the central hub for music playback that can be appealing for both audiophiles and for music listeners in general.

So, without further ado, let’s see what Volumio Universal brings:

MANIFEST USER INTERFACE FOR EVERYONE!

Manifest UI on tablet

The Manifest User, who we introduced in the launch of Volumio 3 only for Premium users, will now be available for ALL, both Free and Premium Users. We believe the Manifest UI is the best in terms of aesthetics and music presentation, so we decided everyone should have it. Old UIs are still available but will be decommissioned (maybe becoming optional plugins) soon.

In addition to have it available for all, we worked on making improvements to be more user-friendly, especially on the mobile version. We also redesigned the main menu and designed a new output menu that gives new and improved functionalities which you will learn more about in the next paragraphs.

NEW OUTPUT MENU

In the manifest UI, there is a new output menu with new and improved functionalities:

  • Volume control
  • Remote Control: the Remote control option on any Volumio device
  • Multiroom Control Management with improvements.

And the newest features of Volumio 3.3. Available for Premium users:

  • Play Here Function
  • Sonos and Chromecast outputs

PLAY HERE FUNCTION

play-here-ui

The Play Here function, allows you to stream the audio from Volumio to your mobile device, your computer and also your smart TV. Pretty much everywhere the UI is displayed. For example, if you open Volumio on your computer browser, you can click on the Play Here button found on the output menu and the sound will come out from your computer.

This means that you can enjoy Volumio as a normal music player app when you work on your PC, or via Bluetooth headphones connected to your mobile phone. Since Volumio is a powerful music aggregator, it’s a convenient way to integrate your music from different sources and leave it playing when cooking, working, gardening or having a party. Where audio quality is not needed, and good background music is preferred.

CASTING TO CHROMECAST AND SONOS

With the Casting option on the output menu, you can cast whatever you are playing in Volumio to any Chromecast and Sonos device. Now Volumio is compatible with different endpoints from the single app. As the title says, output whatever audio you are playing on Volumio to your Chromecast-enabled devices (Google Home, Chromecast-enabled Soundbar, Chromecast Audio, etc.) and SONOS devices.

The stream happens thanks to a low-latency HLS encoding which can be sent to any of the above devices. Please note that synchronization is not possible between Chromecast devices and SONOS devices, but you can play to a Sonos Group to have audio synchronized to that group.

This, in a nutshell, it the latest round of features that you will see in Volumio 3.3. In short, those features will make Volumio YOUR UNIVERSAL MUSIC PLAYER.

How to get Volumio 3.3?

If you are a first time Volumio user, you can download it directly here. If you already have Volumio installed on your device, go to System Updates and click on Check Updates. You are looking for v3.378.

What do you think? Do you like what you see?

Let us know in the comments and enjoy!

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How to Play and Rip Your CDs on Volumio https://volumio.com/en/play-rip-cds-external-cd-drive-volumio/ https://volumio.com/en/play-rip-cds-external-cd-drive-volumio/#respond Fri, 09 Sep 2022 19:38:13 +0000 https://volumio.com/?p=30924 The golden era of CDs, the good old days… Although, we are not missing them as I would have thought

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The golden era of CDs, the good old days… Although, we are not missing them as I would have thought since they have been making a comeback now. Being a millennial, I need to thank Gen Z since they are bringing many trends back (I would’ve preferred to keep some trends in the past, especially the ones related to 2000s fashion, but that’s another topic for another day). The nostalgia feeling of the pre-digital era that Gen Z didn’t fully experience is attracting some curiosity in them. Therefore, the trends and items that were once popular 20 years ago, are now popular again. And CDs, once huge in the 2000s, are back again in the mainstream.

Now it’s a great moment to show you and to let you know that you can bring your CDs back to life with Volumio. Currently, on our Volumio Premium plan, we offer the CD Playback and Ripping feature, and it does exactly as the name says. By connecting an external CD Drive to your Volumio device, you can easily play and rip all the CDs that are hidden in the dust somewhere in your house. Let’s get started and see how you can play and rip your CD on Volumio.

Play Your CD

Once logged in on MyVolumio, connect your external CD Drive to your device. On your screen, go to the Sources menu and you will find an Audio CD option with the CD icon shown. Click on it and Volumio automatically pulls all the CD Metadata. Thereon, you can read all the artist’s stories and album credits. You can play the whole setlist or just each track by clicking the play button on each one.

Rip Your CD

play-cd-volumio

Storage is the next thing you will need. In order to rip your CD and save the CD tracks on Volumio, you can rip and save on your device or in an HDD/NAS connected. To begin, click on the Rip icon.  This will download all tracks in FLAC, you can see all the info Volumio pulls and make the changes you wish, i.e. edit the track’s name. Once you finish making the changes, select the destination disk and click on RIP. You will receive a notification that it’s processing and the timing left to finish the ripping. You can continue using Volumio while waiting.

And that’s it! Now you can rip all the CDs you have in your house and copy them to Volumio. Time to bring the 2000s back!

See the video below:

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Create a Hybrid Playlist From Different Sources in Volumio https://volumio.com/en/hybrid-playlist-sources-volumio/ https://volumio.com/en/hybrid-playlist-sources-volumio/#respond Fri, 27 May 2022 11:02:49 +0000 https://volumio.com/?p=27186 One of the main functions of Volumio is to have “all your music in one place” (Fun fact: This is

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One of the main functions of Volumio is to have “all your music in one place” (Fun fact: This is Michelangelo’s favorite saying). And besides storing all your music in Volumio and streaming from many music services to it, today we want to show you a quick way to create a playlist. We will do it combining tracks from the sources you use on Volumio, this can be from Qobuz or TIDAL, to your music files. 

Sometimes we found some tracks available on a music service but not on other sources we have available. Creating a hybrid playlist works as a way to blend it all together, and play all the tracks without having to jump from one source to another. Let’s see ahead how simple it is to create a hybrid playlist from all your sources in Volumio. 

Add your Sources to Volumio

First, make sure all your sources are connected on Volumio and you are logged in to your MyVolumio account. Connect your sources (NAS connected; Spotify, TIDAL logged in; CD drive connected, whichever sources you will like to get your music from).

On the main page, as you see above, you will find a small icon with the magnifying glasses and a folder, this is the Browse icon and will take you to, you guessed it, the Browse page, which you can see below. Here you will find all the sources available and ready to use on your Volumio device. 

Choose the source, and choose a track

Choose a source from the browse page

Let’s start by clicking one source and finding a track we like. 

Create or Add to a Playlist

Once you find a track, click on the More options (the three dots on the right of the track name) icon and you will find the option Add to Playlist.

Click on Add to Playlist. If you already have playlists created, you can add the track to an existing playlist or create a brand new one. 

add-playlist-volumio-ui

You can go back to the Browse page, choose another source and repeat the same steps to add more tracks to your playlist. 

Once done, you can find all the playlists created, by going to the Browse Page and click on the Playlist section. All of them will be saved on your account so you can go back to each and edit them at any time. 

Add to Playlist from Main Page

There is another approach you can use as well. If you are listening to a song directly from the main page, click on the plus icon and add the song you are currently playing to any playlist.

You can see the full process in the video below:

Now drop in the comments the most original (accepting funny too) playlist name you have on Volumio!

 

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Stream Music via TIDAL Connect and Volumio https://volumio.com/en/stream-tidal-connect-volumio/ https://volumio.com/en/stream-tidal-connect-volumio/#respond Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:54:07 +0000 https://volumio.com/?p=27295 It has been exactly one year since we released the TIDAL Connect feature on Volumio, one of the most expected

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It has been exactly one year since we released the TIDAL Connect feature on Volumio, one of the most expected features since TIDAL released it at the end of 2020.  As many of you have known Spotify Connect for a long time, TIDAL Connect is basically the same, but for hi-res audio. And if you are hearing it for the first time, TIDAL Connect streams music from the TIDAL app to a TIDAL Connect-enabled device, in this case, your Volumio device.

As we all heard your feedback in this past year, what is wonderful about this feature, is the convenience and the ease of use and the availability to control your music not only from the Volumio UI but also from your TIDAL app. To get started with TIDAL Connect is pretty simple. You need: The TIDAL app downloaded on your mobile or tablet and your Volumio device with our Premium subscription.

Set up TIDAL Connect on Volumio

First, make sure you have logged in on MyVolumio Virtuoso or Premium on your device. Then on your mobile, open the TIDAL app and choose the track you want to play and head to the “Now Playing” page. You will see on the top right a device icon, click over there to see all the available devices to connect.

Since your Volumio device has TIDAL connect enabled, you will see your device in the option with the TIDAL Connect written underneath. Click on the device and TIDAL Connet will be connected. You will see the changes on the Now Playing page as shown in the image below. Now TIDAL Connect is active on your Volumio device and you are ready to listen to your favorite music!

 

now-playing-tidal-connect

 

You can control everything directly from the TIDAL app. Plus, if you have the Volumio UI open, you will see all the information about the track you are playing, as the metadata from TIDAL is all sent to Volumio and you can play, skip, and pause from Volumio.

TIDAL Connect with Volumio Multiroom Sync Playback

volumio-multiroom-feature

Multiroom Option

 

Tip: with the Multiroom Sync Playback feature on Volumio, you can stream TIDAL Connect to all your Volumio devices available in the same network. Once you enable TIDAL Connect on one device, go on the Volumio playback page and click on the multiroom icon. Group your current device with all the other Volumio devices you want* (*up to 6).

 

And the final step: play your music at full blast in all your rooms and enjoy!

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Add a Custom Web Radio Station in Volumio https://volumio.com/en/add-web-radio-station-volumio/ https://volumio.com/en/add-web-radio-station-volumio/#respond Fri, 08 Apr 2022 15:27:25 +0000 https://volumio.com/?p=27245 What a great concept it has been Internet Radio! One of the things I enjoy the most about it is

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What a great concept it has been Internet Radio! One of the things I enjoy the most about it is having the possibility to listen to hundreds of web radio stations from all over the world. Additionally, with a good internet connection, I can listen to them without having those noise interference or poor sound quality as it happens with ‘traditional radio’ from time to time. 

Web Radio in Volumio

As a Paraguayan living in Italy, sometimes I want to feel a little bit closer to home, and fortunately, now with technology it is extremely easy. One of my favorite activities is to turn on Volumio and play some Paraguayan web radio shows to catch up with everything that is going on over there. And when I’m feeling adventurous (i know, my level of adventurousness is not the highest), I do a random web radio selection on the Volumio menu filtered by country. 

You can see on Volumio that we have plenty of stations on the Web Radio menu, where you can find it all filtered for an easy search. You can look up from our own selection, by genre or country. In the chance you are not finding the radio station you are looking for, there’s an easy way to add your custom web radio station in your Volumio device and we are going to show you how to do it today. In less than 2 minutes, you will learn how to add all your favorite web radio stations. Let’s get going!

Go to the Browse Page

On the playback page, you will find the browse icon that takes you to a page where you can find all the sources available on Volumio and the sources you enabled on your device and your account. 

playback-page-volumio

All your music sources

This is the Browse page, by default, once you set up your device, the web radio will be available right away. Click on it to see the complete Web Radio section.

browse-page-volumio

My Web Radios Menu

You can search web radio stations in many different categories. One of the sections is called My Web Radio, here is where all the Web Radio stations you add manually will be compiled. To add a station, click on the More options menu (the three dots next to My Web Radio), and go to Add Webradio.

add-web-radio-menu

Add Web Radio Station

The web radio station can be added with a URL or, a M3U or PLS remote file. Simply write down the name you preferred for the web radio station, copy and paste the URL of it, and click on. Once this process is done,  you will find your web radio on the My Web Radios menu.

add-web-radio-menu

There it is! Now you can add all the Web Radio stations you want and have a nice listening session on Volumio.

Now drop in the comments your favorite Web Radio stations so I can add them to my web radio list.

See you next week with more tutorials!

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Volumio Development Team: Weekly Diary https://volumio.com/en/development-team-weekly-update/ https://volumio.com/en/development-team-weekly-update/#respond Fri, 11 Mar 2022 15:11:32 +0000 https://volumio.com/?p=25255 Hey guys! Many things have been going on these past months, from the release of the new Volumio 3 plus

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Hey guys!

Many things have been going on these past months, from the release of the new Volumio 3 plus the new pricing plan in December 2021 (we will go into it on a different topic in the next few days about it), we felt that we weren’t communicating enough about all things going on internally in Volumio, especially on the development side. Well, we want to change our current direction this 2022 and give a couple of minutes a week to tell you what is going on and to provide a bit more “insight” into what the development team is doing, as most of the time what they do is behind the curtain work, which is barely visible but that keeps the whole thing going.

via GIPHY

Hope also that this will be a pleasant read also for the techies out there, and to provide some insights into what means to manage a project of the scale of Volumio. Read below what Michelangelo and the Volumio Development Team are working on now.

February

Week of February 21, 2022 – February 25, 2022

This week we have been focusing on scaling up some of our cloud systems, as since the launch of Volumio 3 we’ve seen a great spike in usage of Volumio and therefore the vital cloud parts of it.

Specifically, we increased the capacity of the infrastructure that makes it possible to access your devices from myvolumio.org, adding automatic ssl renewal to them, experimenting with a new brilliant piece of software (caddy server) and setting up 6 new servers in Asia, Europe and North America.

We also further expanded auto-checks on many new endpoints, following a shameful incident that made some of our repositories unavailable due to expired certificates.

We upgraded the musicbrainz mirror (thanks to the help of musicbrainz dev team themselves) and added a robust caching mechanism. This improves response times of metadata retrieval and also refined the algorithm to provide more accurate results and much more hits.

BTW, if you are curious to know how many servers\cloud servers\services are in Volumio’s architecture, head to:

https://status.volumio.com

It makes very apparent (to us in the first place) how complex is the architecture that we have to host to keep the project going. But this is just reflecting how technology has changed in the last years.
When we started Volumio we just needed one server (for downloads and OTA updates, and this server is still running), but now, a music player needs to interface itself with a myriad of third-party services to provide an adequate level of quality and integrations. This is also because in my opinion, a pure FOSS solution is not enough anymore in this day and age: you need to host a bunch of stuff and pay for it, to make it work.

We finally managed to track down a nasty bug that was affecting users with ISPs not using IPV6 or applying NAT, causing frequent stops in TIDAL, QOBUZ and everything that was streamed over HTTP2. This was due to a bug in curl (on buster) which made http2 requests fail under some conditions. We are currently doing QA on this fix, and if all goes well, next week we will release this update (for the joy of many users and our QA lead Davide).

Works on FusionDSP is progressing nicely, thanks to the effort of two brilliant members of the team and community, we are setting up a new open source component to make Fusion DSP finally work with Volumio’s AAMPP and we hope it can go public very soon.

We are also working on the new version of the Android\iOS app (which will be free). This new version will bring a super easy onboarding for the first time users, allowing them to auto update their devices and to connect to their wireless network in a very easy way.
This in our intention will make life easier for newcomers both of Volumio on Raspberry PI but also on Volumio products (that’s another thing we’re working hard on… stay tuned…).

Unfortunately, what we are really behind schedule is improving the plugins store submission procedure and testing. We have still a huge backlog of plugins to test and no one can really focus on it as the dev team is fully occupied. We are not holding it back however as we are actively looking for someone to take care of it as its first and only activity (if you are interested in being this person, drop me a message).

We also made some minor fixes to CD playback plugin, Tidal Connect, Metavolumio.

That’s it for now, see you next week.


March

Week of Feb 28, 2022 – March 4, 2022

First of all, all our thoughts are for Ukraine and ALL people affected by this tragedy, which is beyond imagination. The team is discussing on how we can send tangible support and we hope we can take action next week.
We decided not to take a political stance, nor to make any statement on the situation but rather focus on doing something tangible to help people in need.

Going back to frivolous stuff, our work this week has been focused on continuing to harden our cloud server infrastructure for remote connection, gradually moving all servers to the new and improved caddy configuration.

On Monday we released a new update which fixed quite some bugs, but unfortunately, the Tinkerboard image suffered from a temporary Github outage, which prevented it from installing some core packages like curl and the remote updater. We then issued an emergency update on Wednesday and our support team is helping those affected.
We are improving the build script in a way that the build will fail if this occurs again, avoiding us to promote releases with missing core-packages.

Two new open-source alsa modules have been released and integrated in the main images, allowing the finalization of the FusionDSP works (which seems very close) and a useful facility for plugin developers.

There has been also bug fixing done for Metadata display on premium plans (from the search function) and some work on CD Playback.

Development on the new apps is currently on halt, awaiting results from testing from Volumio’s moderators and devs.

That’s it for this week. I hope that the next post on this diary will be more cheerful because peace has been reached (although it seems unlikely, but that’s what we hope).


Week of March 7, 2022 – March 11, 2022

This week it has been almost all “behind the curtains” work for the team, boring but very important stuff…

First, there has been an incident when releasing version 3.233: a temporary github outage prevented the build system to download and install some critical components of Volumio image. Basically, the Tinkerboard platform ended up without some very important libraries (curl, flac) and the updater. Other platforms, like the PI, instead were built without the classic UI.
But you already knew about that.

The team work has been directed to debrief the incident and to take proactive measures against it happening again: we tweaked the build system in a way that it will fail the build if that should happen again (thanks Ash!) and add some more tests into our QA checklist for new releases (thanks Davide for the hard work there!).

We will gradually refactor the build system to report (and fail) every minor issue in the build process. Besides increasing trust in release repeatability, it will be a very important step in deploying an automated build system (on a CI) which we are considering for a long time.

In the last times, the complexity of the project has increased substantially, so we are at the point where we need to set up robust procedures (quality, development, support) and debrief very often.

On an organizational level, this is increasing a little bit of internal bureaucracy, but we reckon that it’s a very important task to carry out to ensure we guarantee high-quality standards for our users. The mantra that we are having is: never make the same mistake twice.

Then, works on the new iOS and Android app is progressing, although with some showstoppers: we are trying to solve some compatibility issues with old android versions with the new Wireless set up flows: it appears that older Android versions are not able to receive properly the list of wireless networks to connect to.

We continue monitoring the cloud infrastructure, following the big upgrade that happened in the past few weeks. The scaling of servers and architecture seems to hold up pretty well, and the increased load is handled beautifully.

Last, but not least, since the biggest (and most daunting) bugs of Volumio 3 have been fixed, we are now focusing on minor bug fixing and tweaks, and we have a new version under QA testing, hopefully to be released next week. It will include fixes for Ui, network-attached storage mounting, metadata discovery and more.

As you might notice, developing, maintaining and making Volumio grow, involves a lot of work that is not obvious nor visible to the general public, but it’s equally important to make it work.


Week of March 14, 2022 – March 18, 2022

This has been a good week here at Volumio HQ. The main reason for that is that we somehow feel that we’ve managed to turn around the “bad climate” that we had in this community lately and re-establish the joyful vibe that we strive to cultivate in this place of the net.

We reckon that the release of Volumio 3 hasn’t been without issues: many people were frustrated by a couple of nasty bugs (which we solved) and the lack of plugins in V3. This meant that the community was filled with angry comments by users (and the famous vocal unhappy minority), which were expressing frustration about those issues. This vibe not only made this a quite less interesting place, but had a huge toll on the team’s morale and contributor’s “attachment” to the project.

Thanks to the suggestions of the private moderators’ group we decided to act and put a lot more effort in communicating proactively with the community (what you read is an outcome of this) and the users who were experiencing issues.

It looks like it’s paying off. We can sense that the spirit of this community is getting back. But we are not relaxing, this challenging time was an occasion for us to learn how to do better, and this is what we want to continue to do.

One process which is being reshaped a lot is our technical support and customer help department. First, we wanted to have a better “dispatching” of requests to the proper person in the organization. We achieved so by restructuring the contact page in a more “directive” way, to forward requests to the appropriate person (shop requests\returns, billing, technical support, partnerships, distribution etc.)

Then we wanted to provide faster answers to the people requesting technical support.

By analyzing supports requests we found out that about half of them could be solved pretty quickly without the need of our support people, by just providing small written hints.
So we implemented a chat-bot with automatically matches users’ requests with our knowledge base (which we are filling on an ongoing basis) and provide immediate answers to known problems or situations.

This has proven to work well for some kinds of requests, but really it did not for others. Analyzing the flow and some feedback by our users this week, we found out that this system was not providing enough feedback on the required actions for some users (we required some further action from user before initiating the support session) which felt frustrated of not receiving support and contacted us on other channels (Facebook, forum, etc).

So, we are working to change this part, by changing the user contact flow in those kinds of situations. We expect to have this change live in about 10 days.

So, for those users which felt neglected in the past month, we acknowledge the problem and we are working to fix it, so the next time you need us you’ll find a better experience.

On the development side, work this week has been again on our cloud ecosystem. If you wonder why that is, that we spent all this time on cloud stuff and not on the “Volumio” side of things, here’s why.

Back in 2018, we took a very important architectural decision: move all the integration intelligence to the cloud, rather than on the device.

For example: our albumart retrieval server used to run on the device. It basically identified the artist, album and track and made some queries online to fetch and download the most appropriate albumart for a specific track. This worked well. Or at least it did until one of those online services shut down or change their API (this happens more frequently than you might think).

So, you have 2 ways to solve the issue:

  • Update all the software you have on the field (in our case more than 430k installs). This means that many users will experience the problem until they update their software. It also means that spotting this problem will come only after you have some users’ reports.
  • Move the logic that aggregates online content to the cloud and have the albumart facility in Volumio just rely on that.

We took the second step. This brings some additional advantages:

  • We can understand quickly if something goes wrong, since we can set up automatic monitoring of all the services we use.
  • When we spot a problem and fix it, the fix is instantaneous for all our users, without the need for an update.
  • Doing some optimizations like caching and load balancing we can offer faster response times compared to an algorithm running on the device itself, and make in turn the whole experience better.

This comes also with some disadvantages:

  • It costs money to run those services. If we use the “distributed” computing power of the devices, it does not cost anything. But if we need to set up, maintain and host such systems on a scale required for Volumio, this has a cost.
    Basically, every time you look for an albumart, Volumio has to pay for it. Considering the service we provide for some of those endpoints is free, we have to be very clever to optimize our technology to not be overly expensive (in those cases, we don’t use AWS but a mix of Kubernetes + dedicated VPS with high microservices density).
  • In case it fails, it fails for everyone at the same time. So you have to put in place automatic recovery strategies and monitoring and ensure adequate redundancies.

Some examples of the services that use this architecture are:

  • Oauth login for Spotify, QOBUZ, TIDAL (and possibly more like LastFm)
  • Albumart retrieval
  • Browsing of QOBUZ and TIDAL
  • Plugins store
  • Webradio selection
  • Metadata and credits retrieval

And yes, what needed some love this week was the albumart provider. A change in an upstream API deteriorated the performance of retrieval of artist arts. We were able to fix it and deploy a fix without requiring anyone to update. And the best part of it, is that most of you didn’t notice.

We are continuing with this architectural pattern, especially when we enrich functionalities, which might explain why you see fewer commits on the Volumio backend regarding such aspects.
Some of the things we already worked on (we are waiting for frontend parts to support it) are live concerts notifications and lyrics.

That’s it for this week! Hope you got a better glimpse of how also the community can impact Volumio, both in positives and negatives ways. Remember that and keep on helping make this place a good portion of the net.


Week of March 21, 2022 – March 25, 2022

First of all, we managed to package together the update which we will release next week. It includes various fixes for multiroom, utf-8 characters and the longly awaited AAMMP update (which will allow us to release the amazing Fusion DSP plugin).

What held us up from releasing was a mysterious bug that affected multiroom, which we took a while to identify (turned out to be a very silly mistake, but very hidden and difficult to spot).

Then, finally, we managed to get the new Android and iOS app to a level where we are happy with: the new improved and simplified onboarding flow works well in all circumstances.

It took a lot of debugging, testing, swearing… You can’t imagine how tedious sometimes can be to design and implement a very simple process…
Next time you try a piece of technology that just works, consider that a developer could have lost all his hair to make it work properly :wink:
Our plan is to release a beta test of the new app next week.

This week’s focus has also been a careful analysis of our current state (as a project and as a company) and strategic planning. As they say, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”.

We held various team meetings to pivot our strategy in 2 main areas.

The first is the OEM long-term strategy and approach. As you might know, Volumio OEM  is a service we provide to quite a lot of Hi-Fi companies around the world. We basically empower them to release Hi-Fi products using Volumio Technology and experience. We are proud that more than 30 Hi-Fi companies worldwide choose Volumio to power their audiophile products.

This has worked well both for us and them for the past years and Volumio is what it is today also thanks to the financial and design contribution of our partners.

We however think that we can do better and be more ambitious with the OEM Partner program.
We saw a huge increase in requests to become Volumio OEM Partners since the release of Volumio 3 and a slight change in what new partners require from our technology.

Compared to 3 or 4 years ago, Hi-Fi companies tend now to have in-house IT departments and are asking us for less direct involvement and more freedom when implementing our technology and a more SDK-like approach.

So, we are redesigning our OEM program very similar to what Android does. So yes, our plan is that Volumio will become the Android of the music technology world.
Of course, following our “co-design” approach, we are involving some of our best partners in the decision and design processes.

The other planning involved Hardware. We have ambitious plans and some really, really nice things that we are working on…
We can’t disclose anything at the moment, but, if I were you, I would consider visiting this year’s
HIGH END Munich
 trade show…

That’s it for this week!

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A summer (UI) Refresh for Volumio https://volumio.com/en/summer-ui-refresh-volumio/ https://volumio.com/en/summer-ui-refresh-volumio/#comments Fri, 26 Jul 2019 17:02:09 +0000 https://volumio.org/?p=12389 It’s hot outside, so we need some refreshments. We at Volumio think that an User Interface refresh is the way!

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It’s hot outside, so we need some refreshments.

We at Volumio think that an User Interface refresh is the way! So please welcome: the new Volumio3 User Interface Beta!

We’ve been working hard in those months to improve usability and look of our beloved user interface, following all the great feedbacks from our Community and OEM partners.
The priciples we followed are:

  • Re-use existing (and common) User Experience logics from mainstream music players. So, let’s not reinvent the wheel and let’s take what’s good in other music players out there. So you’ll notice that the structure might look familiar… We’ve taken pieces of UI from our favourite Music Players and combined them together to offer an easy and intuitive environment, without loosing the uniqueness of Volumio’s distinctive look.
  • Allow for more expansion in the future: the new Ui is the first milestone in a bigger overhaul project (codenamed Volumio3). We want to allow advanced navigation capabilities (interlinking and semantic browsing) and providing credits, lyrics and additional informations in an easy and convenient way. This will take place by the end of this year, and we designed the user interface to be ready to adopt those new changes.
  • Great focus on mobile: Mobile use is where we focused the most, with adaptive and dynamic menus.

Let’s see some screenshots:

 

Notice the left bar and bottom bar? Needless to say: this layout works…

 

An easier placement for settings…

Queue, for those who can’t live without…

 

And a great news… We are seriously preparing for multiroom…

 

 

The mobile playback view, in all its glory…

 

Browsing on mobile…

 

Album view on Mobile…

 

Multiroom view on mobile…

 

HOW TO ENABLE THE VOLUMIO3 UI BETA

Super easy:

  • Update to latest version (the new UI is available starting from version 2.598)
  • Head to Settings, Appearance and scroll to the bottom
  • Enable The experimental Volumio3 UI
  • Click save, and restart Volumio
  • Once restarted, refresh your browser page
  • Enjoy!

Since this is a major overhaul, we are keen to receive your feedbacks. So make sure that you let us know what you think, what does not work, what you would like to be improved in the dedicated forum thread.

THE BEST IS YET TO COME

As you might have understood, the contribution of MyVolumio are providing us with a great boost, which we are re-investing heavily in both the Free and Premium side of Volumio. And yes, we have many many new features and updates coming:

  • Multiroom synced playback
  • Advanced Browsing Capabilities
  • Hiresaudio.com integration
  • Deezer Integration
  • Bluetooth integration
  • Credits and Lyrics
  • Analog Input playback

Those great improvements are to be gradually released from here to the end of the year. So, if you needed one more reason to try MyVolumio, now you have it: this will help us bring to you those functionalities as soon as possible!

Enjoy and have a great summer!

 

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