Mopidy Music format issues

Q&A
1

Hi there,

first of all - mopidy is fantastic, I am mainly using it with the ytmusic plugin and iris on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it works like a charm. I do however experience some issues when not working with music from the internet, so hopefully somebody can assist me.

I am currently experimenting to find out the best format for “offline files”. I am adding a tracklist via the API (31 tracks)

  1. if I am adding tracks from ytmusic, the tracklist in iris is “immediately” (as in 1-2 seconds) available and the first song is playing
  2. if I am adding offline tracks the exact same way in format *.webm it takes about 8 seconds for the tracklist to show with all information
  3. when using *.mkv format, it takes about 15 seconds to show the whole tracklist with all information
  4. when using *.mp3 format, it takes about 45 seconds to show the whole tracklist and most of the tracks do not have title, artist, etc displayed.

The reason why that is an issue at all for me is that using either *.webm or *.mkv format mopidy does not continue to the next track after finishing the previous one, so I always have to start playback by hand again with the next track. The logs just display “playback ended” but no errors in that case. With mp3 this issue does not arise at all (but the tracklist takes ages to load).
The only “format” that works flawless is directly using ytmusic, but I want to be prepared for a lost internet connection.

Is there maybe a preferred music format for mopidy with the best performance, or is there a way of speeding up tracklist building?
I am thinking e.g. of txt-files for each track that only contain artist, trackinfo as well as a link to the mp3 file which only gets loaded when the track is playing? This is me thinking the performance issue must be extracting the title information from the files… I could not find any information on such a “playable” format unfortunatelly.

Hope somebody can point me into the right direction

Thanks a lot!

Config:

Running "/usr/bin/mopidy --config /usr/share/mopidy/conf.d:/etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf config" as user mopidy
[core]
cache_dir = /var/cache/mopidy
config_dir = /etc/mopidy
data_dir = /var/lib/mopidy
max_tracklist_length = 10000
restore_state = false

[logging]
verbosity = 0
format = %(levelname)-8s [%(threadName)s] %(name)s %(message)s
color = false
config_file =

[audio]
mixer = software
mixer_volume =
output = autoaudiosink
buffer_time =

[proxy]
scheme =
hostname =
port =
username =
password =

[ytmusic]
enabled = true
auth_json = /home/pi/mopidy_ytmusic_auth.json
auto_playlist_refresh = 60
youtube_player_refresh = 15
playlist_item_limit = 100
subscribed_artist_limit = 100
enable_history = true
enable_liked_songs = true
enable_mood_genre = true
enable_scrobbling = true
stream_preference =
  251
verify_track_url = true

[iris]
enabled = true
country = NZ
locale = en_NZ
verify_certificates = true
snapcast_enabled = true
snapcast_host = localhost
snapcast_port = 1780
snapcast_ssl = false
snapcast_stream = Default
spotify_authorization_url = https://jamesbarnsley.co.nz/iris/auth_spotify.php
lastfm_authorization_url = https://jamesbarnsley.co.nz/iris/auth_lastfm.php
genius_authorization_url = https://jamesbarnsley.co.nz/iris/auth_genius.php
data_dir = $XDG_DATA_DIR/iris

[file]
enabled = true
media_dirs =
  $XDG_MUSIC_DIR|Music
  ~/|Home
excluded_file_extensions =
  .directory
  .html
  .jpeg
  .jpg
  .log
  .nfo
  .pdf
  .png
  .txt
  .zip
show_dotfiles = false
follow_symlinks = false
metadata_timeout = 1000

[http]
enabled = true
hostname = 0.0.0.0
port = 6680
zeroconf = Mopidy HTTP server on $hostname
allowed_origins =
csrf_protection = true
default_app = mopidy

[m3u]
enabled = true
base_dir =
default_encoding = latin-1
default_extension = .m3u8
playlists_dir =

[softwaremixer]
enabled = true

[stream]
enabled = true
protocols =
  http
  https
  mms
  rtmp
  rtmps
  rtsp
metadata_blacklist =
timeout = 5000
2

Sounds like you are using Mopidy-File for your local tracks, use Mopidy-Local instead.