Runeaudio user testing Volumio2 - questions and thoughts

Hello - Runeaudio user giving volumio a whirl

First, the reasons - while I am pretty happy with with Rune - problem is that I am not 100% sure development is progressing - there are bugs that bother me quite a lot that have been there for years… so when I saw the new release of Volumio 2, checked the forums and saw vibrant active development, decided to give it a try, so downloaded and installed Volumio 2.030.

First the questions

  1. Disable mixer
    This is a must - I don’t need the convenience of software volume control - I want bit perfect playback, with volume control on external gear. Had to tweak the /etc/mpd.conf file to disable the mixer - it looks like that works; however, it looks like any change to the playback options will be the return of software volume control. Is there any other (better) way to do this.

  2. Album covers

I am EXTREME apprehensive about this. I have curated my collection’s metadata very carefully over the years - I scan my own album covers, to avoid the crap available out there in the internet. Volumio 2 is still scanning my HD and I see some covers from who the f***k knows where, that obviously I did not add to the file. Pls tell me that:

  • Volumio is not tagging the files with those crappy covers
  • There is a way to make volumio respect the currently tagged covers?
  1. Not crazy about the green - is there a way to change this?

Now the good

  1. Love the collection album view ( assuming, of course, as per above, there is a way to make it display MY covers).
  2. The bugs in runeaudio that have been bothering me are not there!
  3. I am repeating myself, but the library handling is way better

Keep up the good work! I would really appreciate if someone could address my questions above - thnx in advance!

v

Quick update

Hard Drive scan is finished - I seem to have a combination of correct covers, covers that seem to be downloaded from the net and undefined covers… so, again, a way to make volumio default to tagged covers will be great!

thnx in advance

v

Hi Vmartell, I appreciate a lot your feedbacks!

You get sound degradation only with software mixer, which is different from the more general volume control. By design, Volumio will enable hardware mixer if this is available on your DAC. We do this, because this mode has the comfort to change volume and it does not degrade sound quality.
If, instead, your DAC does not have an hardware volume control, we disable volume control. But you still have the chance to enable software mixer, from volume options (in playback options section).
We handle the volume directly from alsa, not from mpd. The reference you see in mpd, is merely for allowing people with mpod to change volume.

That being said, if you want to disable completely the volume control, you can simply select mixer type to “None”, and all volume controls will be disabled. Hope I explained with sufficient clarity, but if you’ve doubts let me know.

First, don’t worry as Volumio is not touching your files in any way (I would kill if that would happen to me…).
Then, what you report is due to a technical reason. If you notice, on playback screen you will always see the right cover. While on the album list, you will see some strange ones. This is because Volumio implements an albumart server which works this way:

  • If a local cover is available (aka on file) we show this
  • If a local cover is not available, but we have the artist and the album tag, we download it from internet
  • If only artist tag is available, we show the artist picture
  • If none of the above is avaialable, we show the default image.

Unfortunately, when browsing albums, we do not have available the information about the path of the files, therefore we can’t look into folders to retrieve the albumart, but we can only search online.
We’ve tried to find a way to get the file paths, but it resulted to be extremely slow.

In any case, I will keep on looking on a technically viable solution for showing the proper arts also on album discovery. If you have suggestions, those will be greatly appreciated (mainly a proper mpd command to get all album names grouped by artists, with their file paths)

Not as of now

Thanks for your feedbacks! Let us know if you have other observations!

First of all, thanks for your kind reply. A things - as per my post, I was running 2.030 - I noticed, after I posted, that 2.031 was available. Updated immediately.

1.- “None” suddenly appeared as a mixer option - that wasn’t available, at least on my setup on 2.030 - 2.031 fixed that
2.- Two bugs:

  • First: aplay -l reports my modi as “Device: Modi 2” - it looks like the volumio gui parses that based on the colon… the modi shows on the gui as “Device”. It works if selected, so it is just a parsing issue

-Second: “None” appeared in the mixer options. Unfortunately, choosing it causes the audio to stop. Looking into the device, I see that at /etc/mpd.conf, in the section for the Modi device, the string “hw:5,undefined” appeared - changing that to hw:5,0 ( I may be wrong on the exact syntax, but hope you get the gist) makes everything work

3.- I see re: the covers - I think I have a Python Mutagen script to extract the covers from files - so, extracting the cover and writing that to a cover.jpg file would be one solution to try, on the personal library side, correct?

4.- Re: a solution on the MPD side, quick look at mpd commans, it doesn’t seem like the available list commands cover that particular case… If I run into something that be used, be sure I will report back

Thanks for everything - with the tweaks I mentioned above, things are working. Will continue testing.

Thnx

v