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!

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

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!

The post Introducing Volumio UNIVERSAL appeared first on Volumio.

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.

We feel very proud of having a great community that shares our same passion for music and great sound, and we are happy you chose Volumio to help you have the listening experience you deserve and build a music player that can adapt to your music needs. With so much info going around (that sometimes can feel a little overwhelming) and many options on how you can use Volumio to the fullest, we wanted to go ahead and give you some tips and recommendations on how to get started and how to get the best out of Volumio.

This is just a quick guide, in the next few weeks, we will go more into depth with the many cool things you can do with Volumio. For now, let’s get started with the basics.

GET STARTED WITH YOUR VOLUMIO MUSIC PLAYER:

SUGGESTED DEVICE

The suggested hardware is Raspberry PI 4, with 2GB of RAM (4 and 8GB are overkill). Pi Zero is not suggested: Volumio works but, it’s very slow and unresponsive.

Considering the current shortage, also PI 3 is a good alternative, but its internal Wi-Fi is known to have issues, so consider using an external supported Wi-Fi dongle for it.

Tinkerboard S is very good, but hard to find.

Last, also PC is a good choice, but considering the countless configurations possible, we can just recommend using Intel NUC.

NETWORK CONNECTION

The biggest limiting factor for a good experience is network connection. If the network connection to your device is not optimal, you will experience disconnection, slow response and sub-optimal audio.

When possible, always use a Wired Connection: this ensures the best stability and swift operation. If you can’t pull a wire to your Volumio, consider a Powerline extender: they offer a reliable connection using your home’s electrical system and they don’t introduce unwanted noise.

Last, if you really can’t, Wi-Fi is a good option if you can use 5Ghz Wi-Fi or you can ensure optimal connection. If you connect via Wi-Fi, check on Volumio Network Settings that you have at least 75mbs speed. Any lower and it means your connection is sub-optimal and you have to try what is suggested above.

POWER SUPPLY

Raspberry PIs are very sensitive to power supply. If the PSU cannot deliver at least 3A at 5V, you’re going to experience instability and SD Card corruption (you have to reinstall Volumio frequently).

The safe bet is going with the official power supply. Don’t save money on your PSU, get a proven quality one if the official power supply is not available.

If you need to use external devices such as Hard Drives, CD Drives, better use a powered USB Hub to compensate for the increased power consumption.

If you use the Raspberry PI touchscreen or an external monitor, use 2 power supplies: one for the PI and one for the display.

CHOOSE A DAC

Volumio works with any USB DAC which is compliant with UAC standards. This means 99% of available USB DACs. If you connect your DAC to Volumio and it does not show up in the Audio Output list, unfortunately you are unlucky to have found this 1%. There’s nothing we can do about it, move on and find another one.

I2S shields are another great option. Before buying your I2S Shield, check on Playback Options → I2S DAC if this DAC is on the list. If it is, good news, it’s compatible and you can go on and get it. If it’s not, it might or might not work, so you’re advised to not get it.

PLUGINS

Even if plugins are carefully checked, we can’t check all the combinations of plugins. So we urge you to just install the plugins you strictly need.

Do not install plugins manually, even if you find many instructions on the forum asking to do so: you’re installing plugins that are not endorsed or validated by the Volumio team, potentially creating stability issues or problems that our support team will not be able to troubleshoot

PLAYBACK OF LOCAL FILES: NAS OR USB

They both work just fine, but for optimal experience and convenience, a NAS is highly recommended. Make sure you get a NAS from QNAP or Synology and you keep your NAS firmware updated (for security and compatibility). Usually, users with not up-to-date NAS cannot use it with Volumio unless they specify special options (like vers=1.0 in advanced options).

VOLUMIO UPDATES

Volumio gets updated very frequently. If you are experiencing an issue, it’s very likely that we already released an update that fixes it. Don’t be the ones that get stuck on an old release because “it sounds better”, check updates frequently and have faith in upgrades.
Usually, when you need to know something when updating, we write it in the changelog. So read it carefully.

Last, make sure you don’t enable TEST MODE on your device, if you do you will receive experimental updates meant only for developers or testers. Those updates can and will introduce unwanted behaviours since we use them to test new stuff. Many people report such misbehaviors only to then discover they are in TEST mode. Do not enable them. If you did, disable them by going to the DEV page and setting TEST to false.

Tip: if you are in test mode, there will be a warning before the changelog stating “WARNING: you are installing a test release”.

SSH AND TINKERING

Volumio is designed to be an open system to allow experimentation. But this requires you to know what you are doing. Usually there are guides that suggest connecting via SSH and performing various manual installs and tweaks. Even if they are written in good faith, there are good chances you will mess up something.
Especially, never ever do apt-get upgrade. This will brick your install.

GET INVOLVED IN THE COMMUNITY

Volumio is what it is today thanks to the music lovers who participated in the community and gave useful insights on their experience and what they wanted Volumio to be.

Join the community and provide your feedback, help others, share your experience. Do it politely and in a constructive way, treat everyone with respect and speak out.

Believe it or not, this really makes a difference.

ENJOY THE MUSIC

via GIPHY

Seriously. Don’t worry about your gear, the orientation of your power plug, the resampling algorithm, MQA blue or the current lunar phase. Get involved in what you listen and forget about being an audiophile, at least until tomorrow.

The post Back To Basics: Get the Best Out of Volumio appeared first on Volumio.

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
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!

The post Volumio Development Team: Weekly Diary appeared first on Volumio.

He has worked with numerous world-class characters, including Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Bob Berg, Michael Brecker, Tony Oxley, Dave Liebman, Kenny Wheeler, John Scofield, Joe Lovano, Toots Thieleman and Ramin Bahrami in the splendid Bach is in the air. He performs in major Italian and international jazz festivals, as well as holding solo piano concerts.

Danilo Rea is also a great Hi-Fi enthusiast, he has never hidden it. In his apartment, numerous systems alternate between the sacred and the profane, between modern and vintage. But the interpretation he makes of Hi-Fi is completely personal, for him a device is like a piano, he chooses them carefully, in short, they must correspond to it. Volumio Primo was immediately part of Danilo’s universe, who immediately appreciated its natural and expressive qualities as well as its ease of use.

Now Primo is a permanent partner of his musical universe, alternating between one system and another, he has made it a real work tool.

Musicista di livello assoluto e molto ricercato in ambito pop e jazz, è considerato tra i migliori pianisti italiani. Diplomato al conservatorio di Santa Cecilia a Roma, è l’artista d’elezione dei migliori interpreti italiani, tra i quali Mina, Baglioni, Celentano, Mannoia e più di recente Gino Paoli. E’ un interprete immenso e viscerale, che ammalia e conquista irrimediabilmente con le sue libere improvvisazioni su temi melodici celebri.

Ha lavorato con numerosi personaggi di livello assoluto, tra i quali Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Bob Berg, Michael Brecker, Tony Oxley, Dave Liebman, Kenny Wheeler, John Scofield, Joe Lovano, Toots Thieleman e Ramin Bahrami nello splendido Bach is in the air. Si esibisce nei maggiori festival jazz italiani e internazionali, oltre a tenere concerti di piano solo.

Danilo Rea è anche un grande appassionato di Hi-Fi, non lo ha mai nascosto. Nel suo appartamento numerosi impianti si alternano, tra sacro e profano, tra moderno e vintage. Ma l’interpretazione che fa dell’Hi-Fi è del tutto personale, per lui un apparecchio è come un pianoforte, li sceglie con cura, gli devono, insomma, corrispondere. Il Volumio Primo ha fatto subito parte dell’universo di Danilo, che ne ha apprezzato immediatamente le doti di naturalezza ed espressività oltre alla facilità d’uso.

Adesso è partner fisso dei suoi ascolti, e lo alterna tra un sistema e l’altro, ci lavora, ne ha fatto, insomma, un vero e proprio strumento di lavoro.

The post Danilo Rea chooses Volumio appeared first on Volumio.

After more than 2 years of work by Volumio Team and the community, we are really pleased to announce that Volumio3 is in the final stage of development and it will be officially released very shortly.

On the Volumio Forum, you may have seen back in February this year we started the testing of Volumio 3 Buster Beta for our dedicated devices (RPI, Tinkerboard and x86). Before giving more details, we want to say thank you to all contributors of our community who have been helping in the development and fixes for Volumio 3 for all these months, it really takes a village to develop an excellent music player, and we could not have done it without all of your help.

Now let’s get to the fun part, what is Volumio 3? What are the next steps for the official release?

About Volumio 3

Volumio 3 is a next-level upgrade from our current Volumio version (Volumio 2). Thanks to our Volumio developers’ works, Volumio 3 will be faster, better in terms of security and future proof. The newest version of Volumio has left the Debian jesse version and is built based on the newer Debian Buster version. Even if it’s not noticeable to the eyes, the Debian Buster version helps Volumio 3 to be better in terms of performance and compatibility.

Advanced Audio Modular Processing Pipeline

That’s the real deal of Volumio3 and it’s the feature that required the most work. We are very proud of it since, from a mere technological perspective, it makes Volumio probably the most advanced audio player in terms of flexibility and audio processing.
The Advanced Audio Modular Processing Pipeline (AAMPP from now on) is a facility built into Volumio that allows plugins to take any audio (from any service and source) and do processing on it, and chaining to multiple processing modules.
This allows a potential huge customizability of audio processing modules, working with each other.

As an example: audio is played from TIDAL Connect, then fed into a parametric equalizer, then sent to network endpoints for synchronized playback.

Other things that can now be possible with Volumio AAMPP are:

• Synchronized multiroom playback
• Adaptive resampling
• Resampling for all sources
• Playing silence when audio is not in use
• DSP and EQ on all sources
• Playback to Bluetooth headsets
• Playback to Chromecast or SONOS

And this is possible for all sources: Spotify, Spotify Connect, TIDAL, TIDAL Connect, Radios, Bluetooth, Analog inputs etc.

We’ve built Volumio AAMPP in a way that also plugin developers can take advantage of it, by defining an API to add their processing modules as Volumio plugins.
And the best of it all is that, when no modules are doing DSP or any manipulation, playback stays bit-perfect.

Additionally, the months of testing have been of great importance to remove as many of the annoying bugs as possible in order to release the most stable version of Volumio 3. But besides the many improvements on the backend system, you will find a brand-new feature on Volumio 3.

Multi-Room Sync Playback in Volumio 3

Yes, you read it correctly. The Multi-room feature will be released in Volumio 3!

Finally, we made it. With Volumio3 you will be able to play in sync ANY source to up to 6 Volumio players (Available for MyVolumio Superstar users).
You will be surprised to hear that we work on this for about 4 years, but we never got something we felt quite up to our expectations.
It took so long because we wanted to be able to synchronize playback, not only for MPD sources, but for all sources, like Bluetooth, TIDAL and so on. And we wanted it to be easy to use and with the ability to switch from single device playback to multiroom playback without interruptions.

This has been made possible by using Volumio AAMPP, by adding a processing module which selectively outputs audio to the audio card or to the network. The rest is handled by the excellent snapcast, which ensures playback is synchronized with a latency of max 0.2 ms.

Adding the multi-room to our list of features will give you the chance to group two or more Volumio devices to fill every room with your favorite music in perfect sync. This feature will be available in one of our premium plans, MyVolumio Superstar.

On the right menu, you can group and sync your devices

New plugins store

One of the things that set Volumio apart is the possibility to extend its functionality via plugins. There are already a whole lot of plugins made by the team and the community and that’s fantastic because it allows to extend Volumio to possibilities that we never dreamt of.
However, that comes at a price: given the complex nature of plugin development and interaction with the core Volumio, sometimes installing one or multiple plugins can make Volumio unstable.
We want to have a better curation of plugins and a better way for plugin developers to test their creation in a safe way, to make plugins available when they are stable and safe for the overall community.
The new plugin store allows to have different stages for plugins (alpha, beta and stable) which allows for broader testing and easier updates.
We are setting up a stricter control procedure and a standardized tests to help developers create top-notch plugins and a facility to rate them.
This is also why, to access the plugin store, a MyVolumio account will be required (of course, the free MyVolumio tier).

New Build System

While our beloved build script worked well for quite some years, it was time for a step up. The whole build system has been refactored to achieve 3 main goals: maintainability, observability and faster builds. While this is something that you will never notice, it means that we will be able to build and deploy faster new Volumio versions, which will mean more updates frequency.

Before the official release…

We understand how the last steps before the release are crucial, so we want to make sure all is stable and working phenomenally before the official release for the public. As I mentioned before, it takes a community to have an excellent audio player, so this is where we want to invite you to help us with the final testing.

To all Volumio users interested in joining us on this final step and help us do the final testing of Volumio 3, please click on the button below and follow the quick steps to participate in the final testing. If you find bugs, imperfections or something not working as it should, please leave a report there.

Thank you to all who helped to make Volumio 3 a reality and we will keep in touch next week with more updates on the testing and official release date.

The post Let’s make Volumio 3 happen! appeared first on Volumio.

This vision resulted in a great partnership with the leader in hifi music streaming, TIDAL. And today, a new feature that will provide Volumio and TIDAL users the finest music experience is finally released on Volumio: TIDAL Connect. 

Over two years ago we incorporated the TIDAL Native Integration feature on Volumio, giving the chance for users to interact with TIDAL directly for the Volumio UI. With TIDAL Connect, we want to give our community what matters most: more options and more comfort. Whether you prefer to manage their TIDAL music content via their app or the Volumio UI, now the choice exists.

TIDAL Connect superb new feature is now available for MyVolumio users, giving a seamless experience to listen to your favorite music from the comfort of the TIDAL app. If you haven’t heard of TIDAL Connect before, let us tell you the advantages you can get with the TIDAL Connect feature in Volumio.

What is TIDAL Connect and the benefits of it on Volumio?

If you haven’t heard of TIDAL Connect before, it is a fairly new feature of the Norwegian music streaming service released back in November 2020.  Basically, you can stream your music directly from the cloud to supported third-party devices. And as of today, all Volumio devices are TIDAL Connect supported and ready to play on! 

Think of it as the same concept as Spotify Connect. TIDAL Connect works the same way: from your phone, computer or tablet, with a click on the TIDAL app, you can cast all your music content to your Volumio device.

Here is better news for audiophiles and music lovers! In addition to easily controlling your music straight from the TIDAL app, you get two more important benefits from it: TIDAL Connect lets you stream all the HIFI music in lossless quality and provides gapless playback. 

The TIDAL connect feature is now available to all MyVolumio Virtuoso and Superstar users.

Whether you have Volumio Primo, or Volumio installed on the official platforms, these will all be compatible with the TIDAL Connect feature. 

How do I get started with TIDAL Connect on MyVolumio?

To use the TIDAL Connect feature, follow these simple steps:

1. Make sure both of your devices are connected to the same network.

2. Update Volumio to the latest version v2.878

3. Login to your MyVolumio –Virtuoso or Superstar– account on the Volumio UI.

4. Make sure your TIDAL app version is on or above: 

– iOS: v2.16.0 or Later –Android: v2.32.0 or Later 

5. Open the TIDAL app from your phone, computer or tablet;

6. Go to the Now Playing page,

7. Click on the “Sound Output” icon and choose your Volumio device.

Now you can listen to your favorite music for hours; uninterrupted and without any limitations in the quality of the music you are listening to. Can’t get any better than this!

This could not have been achieved without the phenomenal community that gives us their inputs and suggestion to continue to improve Volumio. To Mervin and our developer’s team who worked on the integration of this feature for Volumio, and to the TIDAL Connect team to give us their support and a pleasant experience implementing this feature.

Now is time for you to try it out by login into your MyVolumio Virtuoso or Superstar account!

And if you haven’t subscribed to one yet…

The post TIDAL Connect is now available on Volumio! appeared first on Volumio.