I’ve made some changes to my JustBoom/RaspberryPi – including updating to the latest version of Volumio. Over the holiday break I signed up for a 4 month trial of Tidal’s Hi-Fi plan. To access a Tidal plugin on Volumio, and subscription to MyVolumio was required, so I signed up for the trial, and ended up getting a 1 year Volumio ‘Virtuoso’ subscription. My only motivation for getting the subscription was for the Tidal Hi-Fi plugin.

So far my experience with Tidal is less than stellar, and I doubt that I will keep using it beyond this initial 4 month trial. The sound is very good, but the Tidal apps aren’t. On AppleTV it’s very buggy, and whether I use the app on my phone or on AppleTV I really dislike having to endlessly scroll past a pile of content that I have no interest in, to get to my stuff. I mean, they do ask what interests you – why isn’t that shown first? Maybe it just takes a little more time to learn what I actually listen to. We’ll see.

The one thing I do appreciate in the Tidal interface within Volumio is that I don’t have to go through all the stuff I have no interest in. I only see what I have added to my collection, but I haven’t seen a way to add to my collection from within the app – I have to go to the Tidal iPhone app or AppleTV app to do that.

The other MyVolumio ‘benefits’ with their Virtuoso plan include:

• remotely control Volumio devices outside your local network.
• CD playback and ripping.
• Music & Artist credits.

The Music & Artist credits might be interesting, but not enough to warrant a subscription.

It’s not clear whether the upcoming upgrades (multi-room playback and automatic updates) will only be available to subscribers, and I haven’t seen any timelines on when those new features will be available. Regardless, they probably wouldn’t be enough for me to commit to continuing my initial 1 year subscription.

Will see how it goes over the next few months…

One thing I finally got around to after getting a new iPhone, was getting my sources set up again. They seemed to have become corrupted when restoring apps to the new phone.

Connecting to a shared Music library on my Mac proved to be a little tricky.

I found it necessary to set File Share Type to “cifs”, and adding “vers=3.0” to Options.

The message that popped up prior to those two changes could be more helpful I think. It also seemed to disappear to quickly. Or I could just be getting old.

Once the other fields were completed, including my username and password to access my shared library, I saved the settings and Volumio immediately began to index my collection. Hooray!