Musicbox and Allo Boss

Hi,

Just about to buy a Allo Boss DAC and thought I’d better check for compatibility with Musicbox first, I would be grateful if someone could confirm either way.

Thanks in advance…

There’s currently a missing firmware issue in v0.7rc5 which stops it from working, unless you manually run the commands to update it. Someone else recently asked about this and I think I posted the commands on here someplace. Or wait for the next version (which I was planning to do last weekend but didn’t get around to).

OK thanks for the reply,

I’ve been doing a bit of digging around and guess that these are the commands:

apt-get update && apt-get install --yes rpi-update
PRUNE_MODULES=1 SKIP_WARNING=1 rpi-update
reboot

If your planning on a new version I’ll probably just wait because It’s going to take me over a week to get everything in place.

Just to confirm after doing the required updates, Allo Boss is available from the audio dropdown box…And works very,very well, A much bigger step up from the Pi analogue output than I would have expected and I’ve still got to wire in my new set of Tannoys yet.

Many thanks for making it possible with this awesome software…

I am currently using Musicbox on Pi 3 but I was thinking of buying an Allo MiniBoss for a new project with my Pi Zero W. My question is will the smaller Allo MiniBoss DAC be compatible with the Musicbox outputs in the dropdown audio menu?

Only items for Allo are Boss, Piano and Piano+ on the dropdown menu.

You can just select Allo Boss as their instructions say this uses the same driver

That’s great thanks…now just to have one shipped to me.

Dont know if it’s related but since I’ve upgraded I seem to only be able to play single tracks from a network folder, I had this problem a while ago but that was user error (single selected in the ‘now playing’ screen) But not this time, Tried both on and off but no difference also ‘Shuffle’ doesn’t change to green when selected.

Shuffle is not the same as Random.

Every time you click shuffle it’ll randomise the order of tracks in the tracklist. It’ll do that as many times as you click it. It is not stateful i.e. it is not enabled/disabled and therefore won’t “turn green”. The next track to be played will be the track after the current one in the new tracklist.

Random mode leaves the tracklist unmodified but the next track to be played will be a random track from the tracklist. If you then disable random mode the behaviour will return to picking the track after the current one in the tracklist. The order of the tracks in the tracklist will not have changed at any point.

If you are still having a problem playing the next track then please enable the mopidy debugging logging (from websettings) and provide the log. If you could also confirm that non-network share music files (e.g. files on the SD card) have the same issue or not, that’d be helpful.

Thanks for the explanation regarding the shuffle function.

Removed the sd card to add a few tracks in a root folder and on reboot tracks were again playing as expected, However the tracks placed in the folder were not recognised, I also connected a memory stick to the Pi with a few albums on again this was not recognised.

I set the log to debug as suggested but I am unable to find the output, (Don’t even have a ‘var’ folder)

Regards…

What do you mean? You just said they played as expected.

Are you rescanning after moving these files and inserting this USB stick? Are you using the Browse → Local media page to view and play these files?

The websettings page states:

Existing tracks on the Network played as expected…Not the new tracks placed on the sd card as stated these files were not recognised.

Musicbox is set to scan on reboot so yes both sd card and usb memory were available to be scanned after restart ( I assume that a path does not need to be set )

I used Browse -> Musicbox and for usb Browse usb -> USB1 2 3 etc. seems logical to do that.

Nice to know that the logging can be found there however I don’t even have a tmp folder.

It’s fair to say that I may have broken something after having to do a forced update to support the Boss, Really didn’t want to do that but had no choice, So I tried Rune and it worked flawlessly for me first time…Think it makes sense for me to stick with that until you find time to do a proper update and I’ll try again.

Thanks for all your hard work so far…

That sounds like you are actually doing Browse → Files → whatever. This is different, hence why I explicitly asked. Anything under the Files browsing is dynamically scanned as you access the containing folder. I wonder what’s going on there.

I am 100% sure you have a /tmp folder on the filesystem. If you are trying to view the SD card on a Windows machine that it will only be able to see the /boot folder, this might also be the case on a Mac. If you login to Musicbox via SSH you can view the log file by running cat /tmp/mopidy-debug.log.

If you are unable to see the /tmp folder I guess you probably were not able to put the tracks in the right music folder (/music). You refer to putting them

but I’m not sure exactly what that means.

I have been working on v0.7.0 the last few days. This highlights I need to spend some time on the File backend. Debugging network share issues is difficult as there are many file servers all with their own issues. That’s why the debug log is so useful.

I guess everyone has a preference as to how they access their music, For me it is purely a matter of file selection so I do indeed use Browse -> Files -> Etc…I should have made my explanation of that a little clearer, I have little to no use for Artists,Genres,Playlists etc as I have each Album in a single folder that criteria is already met for me (Burrow down to required folder (Album) start playing the first track and all following tracks are played until the album is finished, At least thats what I’m trying to acheive.

I am unable to find the /tmp folder but am able to see the music folder I created along with the contents, Other folders I have available are ‘contents’ and ‘overlays’ it’s probably Windows not reading the structure correctly.

I’m busy at the moment but give me a few hours and I’ll fire up putty and see if I can dig out the debug log if it’s of use to you.

Sure, I totally get that. It’s just probably not obvious that the “File” browsing and the “Local media” browsing work very differently in regards to how they scan for metadata. The “Local media” browsing used to include a file system view of the music (as “File” does) but it was removed since it was deemed they were overlapping (even though they work very differently).

This is exactly a Windows issue. There are two partitions on the SD card:

  • /boot: small FAT32 partition that all systems can read, contains important config files.
  • /: everything else on an ext4 partition that only Unix systems can read, includes /music where music files must go, /var where logs usually live, and /tmp where the debug log lives.

I’ve just checked the documentation and it’s really not obvious where the local music files need to go. That’s an area I will fix.

Good point, I didn’t really think there were any ‘under the hood’ differences as to ‘file’ or ‘local media’ browsing but just two different ways to get to the same end result.

Little wonder that the files that I tested on the sd card didn’t get scanned as they were on the wrong partition, Probably fine placed in the right path but I won’t try again as there are better storage options available.

That really just leaves the lack of usb file detection…I’m going to swap back to MB now and see what I get.

I’m an admitted noob, that said, hope someone can help. I have a RPi3 with an Allo Boss card. I can configure multiple settings, network, streams, etc., no problems, but when I change setting dropdown from automatic to Allo Boss the Pi crashes on reboot. I tried it from the app and by cycling power, it crashes both ways. Any help would be appreciated

From what I can gather via google (I don’t have this hardware), it looks like support for this is broken in pimusicbox. Are you able to login via ssh and run a few commands to update your files and test the fix for me?

I can confirm that the Allo Boss DAC works flawlessly with Musicbox…Been using it for a few months now and not one problem. I guess you are using the latest software as you have the Boss available in the dropdown list but I’m using RC5 I think (Just checked and can’t find the rev number anywhere in Musicbox), So maybe it would be worth rolling back and trying that, You will need to do a manual update though as the required firmware files are not available in that version.