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Can Hifiberry OS play music on its own?

Joel Fritz

December 31, 2022 00:45

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I've been using Hifiberry OS with a DAC +DSP for about a year.  I've never been able to use is as a music player.  I've installed it, used the room correction features, and set up sources.  I've used it as a DLNA renderer with BubbleUPNP, a LMS renderer with Squeezer and LMS, and an MPD source with YMPD and MALP. 

My music library is on an NAS.  It contains about 80K files.  After many tries (and failures)  I managed to get it to build an MPD database that shows content under the "music" source.  I can right click on a tile and select either play or two flavors of queue.  Play results in no output and nothing displayed on the now playing screen.  I haven't been able to find a place that displays the queue. 

Is the music player feature  an experimental thing?  When I use a different front end the current file shows on the now playing screen but the controls do nothing.  I have had no success playing music except through the front ends mentioned above.

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7 comments

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  HiFiBerry team December 31, 2022 06:49

  80k files is extremely large. We never tested it with this amount of files. In general the "Local music" source works best with small collections. One important thing: the files have be tagged correctly. Without tags, the frontend can't handle the files.

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  Joel Fritz December 31, 2022 17:52

  I use Hifiberry OS because of my DAC plus DSP HAT.  The room correction is easy to do and produces a noticeable improvement. 

  My problem is with the controls although it may be related to library size and tagging.   After the scan completes the library display appears.  On a desktop machine, as described above, I can select music to play but it usually doesn't show up on the now playing screen.  Sometimes it does but the controls don't respond.  On a tablet it's impossible to get the response I can get from a right click on a desktop.  I've tried connecting a mouse and keyboard to the tablet and get the same lack of results. 

  For the heck of it I'll try a flash drive with a simple directory structure and see if the web interface plays better with it. 

  I have work experience with user defined attribute fields, i. e. tags.  The database dictum, "If users are allowed to enter anything in a field, they will," applies here.  My library started over 20 years ago and is haphazardly tagged.  A lot of the files are from CD and LP rips.  I've always used directories to organize my music.  A vanilla MPD installation has no problem with the library.  A first time scan takes 2 to 5 hours depending on the hardware.  I've used various MPD front ends as well as most of the hacked OS music systems for the Pi.  All of them handle my library. 

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  Joel Fritz January 01, 2023 16:17

  I tried a flash drive with about 100 files as the MPD source.  It worked, more or less.  l couldn't get consistent results but when it worked I was able to play single files or queue an entire folder. 

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  Sergiu Burian January 05, 2023 19:03

  I am using a USB Stick as local library with round about 160 Gb of FLAC albums. I assume about 400 CDs that I have digitalized. Works without any issue on a RPi 4 2Gb. It also updates fast after any change on the file system. I can truly recommend this. However, you MUST check the Album, Album artist and the Artist Tag of each file. They must be clean

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  Joel Fritz January 05, 2023 21:39

  I understand the reliance on tags.  Given the size of my collection and its haphazard tagging I don't want to spend the time to insure that each required tag field is populated. 

  It seems to me that Hifiberry OS is designed to ignore what in database design is called the primary key.  The main requirement of a primary key is that it be unique and that every data element depends on it.  The only natural primary key to a group of files is file path, i. e. location on disc.  Tags, to me are a nice to have, additional ways of grouping the data that can come in handy.  Every other media OS for the Raspberry Pi supports access by file and directory.  MPD, on which Hifiberry OS, Moode, Volumio, and a host of others is based supports access by file and directory.   Because I can use a variety of other ways to access music this way in Hifiberry OS, including YMPD,  I'm not unhappy.  I'm just surprised that the OS doesn't support access by file for local music since MPD does.

   

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  Sergiu Burian January 06, 2023 01:52

  Hi Joel Fritz, I understand the issue you are having with checking each file. For HiFiBerryOS I guess it is purely the philosophy to avoid paths, filenames and foldes and give a CD/Vinyl - like collection experience. If you have CDs or Vinyl, the music stored on them will also not have paths. When users talk about songs, they will say "The song abc from the album xyz / from the artist pqr", and here the philosophy is the same. If you are into programming, you can see how they scan the library by those tags using mpd/mpc functions, see /opt/beocreate/beo-extensions/mpd/index.js , the updateCache function. Furthermore, the mpd client (mpc) offers convenience functions to search the library using tags, but no paths and folders; you can check the mpc list options. So it is easier to create the collection view based on that, rather than creating the logic to convert a multi-level directory structure in a library view.

  Nevertheless, a folder view would be useful as well, on top of the current collection view. I agree. You will always have some incorrect tags in a huge library, and in fact there are a lot of questions in the forum why certain songs are not shown, or empty albums are shown (cause: wrong / missing tags). So, time to write an HiFiBerryOS folder-view extension ?

  If not, metaflac is your friend. If you already have a clean directory structure or file names but missing the tags, you can write the script to populate the tags from the file names / dir names, see some examples below (which you can adapt):

  If you want to generate track no and title tags from the filename <TrackNo> <Track title>.flac for all the flac files in the current folder:

  for fn in *.flac; do tmptrack=$(basename "$fn" .flac | cut -d ' ' -f 1); tmptitle=$(basename "$fn" .flac | cut -d ' ' -f 2-10); echo "Number $tmptrack Title $tmptitle"; metaflac "--remove-tag=TITLE" "--remove-tag=TRACKNUMBER" "--set-tag=TITLE=$tmptitle" "--set-tag=TRACKNUMBER=$tmptrack" "$fn"; done

  If you want to generate track no and title tags from the filename <TrackNo>-<Track artist>-<Track title>.flac for all the flac files in the current folder:

  for fn in *.flac; do tmptrack=$(basename "$fn" .flac | cut -d '-' -f 1); tmpartist=$(basename "$fn" .flac | cut -d '-' -f 2); tmptitle=$(basename "$fn" .flac | cut -d '-' -f 3-10); echo "Number $tmptrack Artist $tmpartist Title $tmptitle"; metaflac "--remove-tag=ARTIST" "--set-tag=ARTIST=$tmpartist" "--remove-tag=TRACKNUMBER" "--set-tag=TRACKNUMBER=$tmptrack" "--remove-tag=TITLE" "--set-tag=TITLE=$tmptitle" "$fn"; done

  If you want to generate track no and title tags from the filename <TrackNo> - <Track artist> - <Track title>.flac for all the flac files in the current folder - mind the spaces around the hyphens:

  for fn in *.flac; do bn=$(basename "$fn" .flac | sed -e 's/\ -\ /-/g'); tmptrack=$(echo "$bn" | cut -d '-' -f 1); tmpartist=$(echo "$bn" | cut -d '-' -f 2); tmptitle=$(echo "$bn" | cut -d '-' -f 3-10); echo "Number $tmptrack Artist $tmpartist Title $tmptitle"; metaflac "--remove-tag=ARTIST" "--set-tag=ARTIST=$tmpartist" "--remove-tag=TRACKNUMBER" "--set-tag=TRACKNUMBER=$tmptrack" "--remove-tag=TITLE" "--set-tag=TITLE=$tmptitle" "$fn"; done

  List all my artists from the database built from FLACs:

  mpc list ARTIST

  I hope this helps,

  Sergiu

  Edited by Sergiu Burian January 06, 2023 01:55
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  Joel Fritz January 08, 2023 01:50

  I always sorted my vinyl this way.  Alphabetically by artist.  I adopted the same model for computer storage because it mirrored my records. I spent a fair amount of my work life parsing text.  I'm familiar with the basic techniques.