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

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:

The post How to Play and Rip Your CDs on Volumio appeared first on Volumio.

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. 

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!

The post Create a Hybrid Playlist From Different Sources in Volumio appeared first on Volumio.

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!

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

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!

The post Stream Music via TIDAL Connect and Volumio appeared first on Volumio.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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!

The post Add a Custom Web Radio Station in Volumio appeared first on Volumio.

I work with a lot of different playback systems whilst supporting bliss and the one thing they have in common is a requirement to get your library organization right. That’s a subtle requirement; in general, music will play fine. But to get the most out of a music system it’s best to make sure your library is correctly organized. That includes Volumio.

Volumio offers a bunch of handy helpers to work around music library inconsistencies and incompleteness. For example, a cover art downloader is built into Volumio to automatically populate missing album artwork (in the UI; files are unaffected). But still, your Volumio experience can be improved by following a few simple rules to improve your library.

In this article, I’ll demonstrate some of these rules, and then show how bliss can be used to implement fixes.

Cover art

To some, cover art is an irrelevance. To many though it’s an essential part of a digital music collection; it helps with selecting and finding music as well as its enjoyment whilst playing.

Volumio first looks for artwork in an image file inside an album folder, and then, if enabled, inside a music file (cover art can be embedded inside a music file). If that fails, Volumio can look up the artwork online.

Here’s an example library I put together:

Looking good, except for that pesky missing cover art for Electric Music’s North London Spiritualist Church. These types of gaps can be frustrating!

The fix is to find the artwork yourself, and save the image with one of the following names in the album folder:

coverart
albumart
cover
Cover
folder
Folder

The images can be in either PNG or JPEG format with the usual file extensions, .png or .jpg respectively. The first character can be capitalized, as can the entire file extension.

Alternatively, I’ll show how to fix it with bliss later on.

Multi-artist compilations

Scroll down the list and it gets worse – my library is totally disorganized:

We can see an album has been split by its track artists. This is common in a lot of music players, such as iTunes.

The cause is that the album’s track artist varies from track to track. The fix is to either set one consistent artist for all tracks or (and this is better) to set an ALBUM ARTIST field for all tracks. Another approach is to mark the tracks as being within a compilation using the COMPILATION tag.

You can do this with any music tagger, common ones used as MP3Tag (Windows) or Kid3 (Mac); again I’ll show how to do this with bliss later.

Multi-disc albums

Multi-disc albums are those where the album contains multiple media in one of the release formats, such as multiple CDs. If you’ve ripped from a CD then, chances are, the files are separated by CD. If the album name tags are the same for both rips, this means the tracks will be grouped together, which is probably what you want; after all, it’s the same album.

However, if there’s no way of distinguishing that the tracks came from separate media then the ordering of the tracks will be mixed up. Here’s what Elvis Costello’s The Very Best of Elvis Costello looks like for me:

The track listing is wrong; it starts (What’s So Funny ‘Bout)… from disc one, which is correct, but the next track should be Oliver’s Army. Instead, tracks one and two from disc two interject.

There are two main solutions. The first, less acceptable one, is to simply rename the albums, splitting them, e.g. “The Very Best of Elvis Costello (Disc One)“. However, this loses the canonical spelling of the album and may make things like album art lookup more difficult.

The better solution is to add DISCNUMBER tags, set to 1 and 2 for the tracks in each of the discs respectively. Again, music taggers like MP3Tag can do this, alternatively I’ll be fixing it in bliss below.

Setting bliss up

bliss is a bit different to the other music taggers I mentioned. The latter tend to provide an interface to change what you like in music files, with some batch actions. bliss is different; instead you specify which constraints you want your library to obey. You do this by defining rules. From there it does the same job as a ‘vanilla’ music tagger: it writes to the tags inside music files.

There are many advantages to this; beyond the fact that there’s simply less work to do this way, it’s a better longer term solution because the same rules can be continually applied as a library develops.

That’s all a bit abstract, so applying this to this discussion, we can define rules from what we have learnt above (plus adding a bit of interpretation and determinism):

• Cover art should be called Folder This is a good choice for interoperability with older versions of Windows.
• Only JPEGs and PNGs are permitted.
• We want to use ‘canonical’ album artists.
• We want to use canonical album names.
• We want to ensure the DISCNUMBER field is populated.

Once bliss is installed, you can set it up. Click the settings cog, and enable the rules we have defined above. First, click the ON/OFF button for Cover art and enable the rule:

Now onto the bliss Tags rule. Click ON/OFF under Tags

Here we’ve specified we want canonical album and artist names, and also we require the DISCNUMBER and COMPILATION fields to be populated.

Once the settings are complete, you can begin bliss’s scan by clicking Apply Rules. At this point, bliss starts scanning the library. bliss will automatically fill in missing cover art, but all other actions can only be automated if an automation option is presented in the settings.

Once each album completes its scan, it is marked as being Compliant or Non-Compliant against your rules.

As the missing cover art rule is fully automatic, that missing cover art is filled in for us:

The Atlantic Soul album is marked non-compliant; not only is the disc number not part of the canonical album name, but the overall album name is incorrect too. In addition it’s not marked as a Compilation as it should be:

I’ll click the fix buttons to make the album compliant. In addition, I’ll set “Various” as the ALBUM ARTIST for this album using the web based tag editor:

Finally, on to our single artist, multi disc album. When checking the album detail page for The Very Best of Elvis Costello we see options to set the disc numbers to make sure playing order is preserved:

Clicking the Grouped fixes brings the album back into compliance.

Back to Volumio!

Click My Music from the settings cog, then the Update button to re-scan the changed music files. Occasionally you may need a full Rescan.

The cover art is now correctly completed:

The multi-disc album is no longer split:

And finally The Very Best of Elvis Costello now has a correctly ordered tracklist:

I hope that gives an idea of how bliss can help organize your Volumio music library!

BLISS HW WEBSITE

The post How to get a perfectly organized Music Library: a guide by Bliss founder Dan Gravell appeared first on Volumio.

The toolbox

As any analysis activity, we need to have the right tools, and this is no exception as we’ll be using different softwares to analyze our files. There are many softwares which can help you analyzing your audio files, among the others:

• Audacity, free tool for audio recording, mastering and analysis
• Dynamic Range Meter, a tool to measure DRM of your files

However, my personal favourite is MusicScope, a complete and incredibly advanced toolset to analyze every single detail of your files. I just fell in love with it, since it includes all the measurement you’ll ever want to do to your files, and its so advanced that learning how to exploit its capabilities can be really interesting and instructive. And, we’re extremely happy to have it featured in our shop, as you can buy it here on Volumio, contributing to funding our amazing project.

So, without further talks, may we begin!

Music Sources: Analog vs Digital 

In music, there are two types of sources: Analog and Digital. To keep it simple, an analog medium is a way to store sound by physically imprinting the music onto the media, by creating a physical representation on it. That’s why they are called analog: they offer a representation-analogy. Whereas, a digital music source is a digital medium that has digitally encoded a representation of the musical event. This representation is made by a huge amount of 1’s and 0’s lined together, and delivered at a certain speed (clock).

So, while the Analog media are usually a representation of music, digital files are always an approximation, since they are essentially 1 and 0’s tied together by an algorithm. That’s why the quality of a music file is determined by lots of important factors, equally important to define the outcome of the representation. The most obvious is its resolution which is measured in bits and kHz (comparable to megapixel resolution in an image). This topic will be featured in a further article for a more comprehensive dissertation. It might be a better start to examine the qualities of music we want to preserve to get the most “musicality” out of it.

Sound analysis 101: Decibels and Dynamic Range

There are a lot of aspects when it comes to understanding how a song’s final recording achieves it’s worth. Sound level is one of them, measured in decibels or (DB), which is a ratio that uses a logarithm to describe the amount of power, sound pressure, voltage or intensity of the musical piece you are listening to. In order to have virtuous music you want to have an accurate amount and variation of the recorded output.

For a file to be considered with good characteristics then it must have a certain dynamic range level, usually referred as Dynamics. Defining dynamic range is not too complicated as it is the contrast or variation of the quietest and loudest volume that the instrument or musical piece makes. Imagine complete silence and suddenly a drum kicking in: that’s what dynamics in music is all about. Typically, good recordings offer a great output level difference beetween their lowest volume sound and their highest, and that will make you appreciate the artist’s virtuosism.

The problem is that in today’s world of music technology and recordings, the euphonious playback is commonly compressed and limited through dynamic range as it allows for the volume to be louder.  Most audio engineers in today’s music industry make the choice to behead dynamics so that their music sounds somewhat louder and easier to listen to when people are sitting in their cars or at social gatherings jamming out to some tunes, and that those music will sound loud even with low quality listening gear.

And that’s a shame since in the process, a very important part of the original music message gets lost,  making the music less exciting and vibrant for the discerning listener.

Below is an image that displays the dynamic range of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous trough the years.  As you can see, the album’s dynamics have been progressively compressed until getting under the bad side on the DR scale unlike the imprinted and uncompressed files that have a good DR scale. For a detailed and comprehensive explanation, head to the excellent article “It’s the mastering, stupid! ‘How record companies are ruining music” .

Dynamic Range of MJ’s dangerous across a decade, image from tcervo.com

 The understanding of what dynamics are and the range it has plays a key role in the quality of artwork because it displays to the listener what is not only real but also a good sounding audio file. In order for a file to sound good to the ear it must have a good dynamic range and a good dynamic range comes with a balance between a pleasant volume of highs and lows along with the original natural sound.

Long story short: evaluating your file’s dynamic range is a good method to grasp their resemblance with the original event, and the care taken in mastering such musical information. Let’s see how you do it.

A first method is using Dynamic Range Meter, which will give you a result in form of a number. It ranges from 1 to 20, with values lower than 8 being absolutely bad, values ranging from 8 to 13 begin good but not optimal and values greater than 13 being excellent. Basically, greater the value, greater the Dynamic Range. You can read it in full depth (and compare several measured values) at the Loudness War Info page. So, let’s compare the values of the same song from Michael Jackson, Dangerous, in two different releases (with two different remastering processes). The left one is the original version, with a good (altough not great) DR, while the remaster performs significantly worse.

We can have a further insight of what the difference are using MusicScope and its clever Spectral Analysis tool, which we’ll be covering further in the next section. You can visually see the dynamic compression in the second image.

Spectral Analysis

The next step in evaluating how good is your file is to look at the spectral analysis. Basically, it identifies the frequencies of the music file in a visual way: depending on how high or low the notes are the spectral analysis will graph the measurements of “all the frequencies vs. the time” in the file to display them in a spectral diagram. The lower the frequency in the file the lower the notes are and vice versa, the higher the frequency means the higher the notes are. The use of a spectral analysis is a reliable tool to help recognize if the file has been converted from a low quality piece of data to a higher frequency one.

Why is this important? Imagine you want an high resolution image of your favourite panorama. The obvious choice would be taking a picture with an High resolution camera, right? Ok, now imagine that instead you use your high resolution camera to shoot a picture of the same panorama, but instead of focusing the panorama iself you just “scan” a printed picture of it. You will get two equally big files, with lots of information, but only one of them is actually Hi-Res. The same can happen with audio files, with low resolution ones being converted to hi-res.

To tell if a file has been converted from a low quality one to a high frequency one with spectral analysis you want to identify if there are “holes” in the freqency ranges, or if there are frequencies cut-off (musical informations are not stored above or below a certain frequency).

For example, let’s compare the very same track, in this case Wish You were here (from a 24/96 FLAC from master) with different encodings. All measurements are taken with SoundScope’s excelellent Spectrum Analyzer. The below image shows the original file, with all its frequency extension.

Now, we do something funny: we convert this FLAC to 128kbps (CBR, constant bit rate) MP3. Just by looking at it you can understand how much of the original music message has been lost.

And now we do something really weird: we transcode our nasty MP3 back to hi-res FLAC format.  At this point you might ask yourself: what’s the point of converting an MP3 back to FLAC? Actually none. But it’s a good way to demonstrate how the starting point of the musical encoding matters so much. Especially when you think on Hi Resolution files that you can buy from specialized websites: they will be actually Hi-Resolution ONLY if they are encoded from the master recording, and not (as sometimes happens) from CD Quality recordings. This practice is called transcoding,

You can clearly see how the transcoding emulates in a linear manner the Spectrals of the low quality MP3. And this is the trick that allows us to spot transcoded files from lower quality.

Lossy vs  Compressed Lossless vs Uncompressed Lossless

Now, with a good understanding on what music sources, decibels, and a spectral analysis are and how they work, we can finally move on and get information on the different types of audio formats out there and the role they play in musical entertainment. The formats are either an uncompressed lossless, compressed lossless, or a lossy file.

An uncompressed lossless audio file stores all of the original data, but being uncompressed tends to make the file much larger than other formats. WAV and AIFF files are examples of an uncompressed lossless audio. What you get is all the quality from the original encoding, but a very hefty file.

Compressed lossless files are next on the list and although they store all of the original data too (lossless), they are less larger files due to compressing the musical information without deleting any of the original musical message. For example, by giving silence no bit rates per second they usually have a final result better than an uncompressed lossless file.

Lastly, Lossy formats are always compressed and most of the time they have smaller file sizes than the other formats because they eliminate some of the original information. MP3, AAC, and WMA are all examples of a lossy file. A MP3 file is an encoded format that is used for storage or transmission on digital audio, but it uses compressed lossy data to minimize the size of the file so that the file can still sound like the original uncompressed audio for the person listening.

Long story short: the sweet spot beetween preserving the original quality of the recording without the need to own a datacenter is to prefer compressed lossless, like FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

That’s all for now, folks. This will be the first article of a series of writings dedicated to understanding, in simple terms, what makes up for a good listening experience in the digital domain. In the next article we’ll be talking about Bitdepth and Frequencies in audio files.

If you feel we did not cover enoug the matter, or you have suggestions for the next topics let us know via comments below, in the meanwhile you can unleash your curiosity and start analyzing your files with the excellent MusicScope Audio Analyzer!

The post Understanding sound quality in the digital domain, part 1 appeared first on Volumio.

One of the most awaited plugins for Volumio is finall here: the touchscreen plugin. With it you can easily show the gorgeous Volumio UI on any display, included the official Raspberry PI Display, available on our Shop. Let’s see how to easily achieve a fantastic touchscreen for your favourite music player in less than 10 minutes. This tutorial will explain how to connect the Raspberry PI display and enable the Volumio UI with the plugin.

STEP 1: The wiring 

Assuming you’ve already downloaded and flashed Volumio to your Raspberry PI (we suggest to use the newest  Raspberry PI 3), the first step is the wiring:

1. First, let’s attach the ribbon cable going from the Raspberry PI Display to the PI itself. On the Raspberry PI Side, make sure the blue part of the ribbon cable is facing outwards. Your final goal should look like this:
   
2. You’ll have 4 coloured cables to connect too. They are 5v, GND, SDA and SCL. You can look at the below image to identify the proper pin on the Pi itself.
   Therefore, the wiring should look like this
   Done! You’ve done the wiring required to connect the Raspberry PI official touchscren, let’s move on!

STEP 2: Power Supply Check 

Notoriously, feeding your PI with an adequate Power Supply is mandatory to have a reliable system. That’s especially true when we connect a power-hungry device like the Raspberry PI Display. Luckily, there’s a way to understand if your PSU is good enough: just power on your pi and observe the screen, if you see a coloured square on the top-right side of the screen, it means that power to your PI is not enough. Don’t you see it? Then all is good.

If you have such problems, don’t worry. Good power supply are cheap and easy to find. Here’s the NorthPada 5V 2000mA PSU, my personal favourite.

STEP 3: Install Volumio’s Touchscreen plugin 

That’s the easy one. Just connect to Volumio’s WebUi as you would usually do, and navigate to the Plugins page from the settings menu. In Miscellanea category, you’ll find the Touchscreen plugin. Just click install, nothing more. PLEASE NOTE: The touchscreen plugin is compatible with volumio version from 2.001 onwards

The installation will last about 7 minutes, so wait patiently until you see “Installation Complete”. Now you can enable or disable the Display output to your likings.

STEP 4: Enjoy it!!!

I must admit that altough this display is not particularly brilliant when it comes to resolution and colour accuracy, it looks indeed very nice with Volumio’s UI. Also, usability is very good on the Raspberry PI 3 and the UI runs smoothly also with big libraries… So, folks, enjoy!

Are you looking for alternatives? 

If you don’t have a Raspberry PI, or you’re simply looking for alternatives to the Official Raspberry PI Display, there are at least two extra options for you:

THE ODROID DISPLAY

The Odroid display is not only a viable alternative, it also have several advantages over its PI counterpart:

• Since it takes power from USB and video signal from HDMI, it can be used virtually with any Computer with an HDMI output, not just the Odroid or the Raspberry PI.
• It has a better resolution: 1024 x 600 vs 800×480 of the PI display
• It’s somehow simpler to integrate into a beautiful case (thanks to its mounting holes)
• You can still use an I2S DAC with the Display, since it does not use any GPIO port (both on Raspberry PI and Odroid)

The Odroid Touchscreen display is available at Odroid’s webshop or on Amazon

UPDATE: Lot of time since I published the original article. The Odroid 7” does not seem to work properly with Raspberry PI (not tested with the Odroid). So, if you’re looking for a display for the Raspberry PI, get the official one.

WAVESHARE 7” DISPLAY

The Waveshare 7” display has become rapidly a widely adopted display, thanks to its cheap price. However this particular touchscreen has shown several reliability issues (altough this seems fixed in latest models, thanks to a firmware update), it requires a particular touchscreen driver which is not always included in major distros and its colour reproduction is not the best.

It can be found at the Waveshare Shop or on Amazon

Here we are folks! Hope you found this article helpful, you can share via comment below how you use your Volumio’s touchscreen setup and if there are other display alternatives!

Get your Official Raspberry PI Display from our store and help the project!

[product sku=”EAR2718″]

The post Raspberry PI Display and Volumio: a touchscreen music player appeared first on Volumio.