Upmpdcli needs restarting regularly to stream from Samsung mobile to musicbox

I’ve recently had my first experience with a Raspberry Pi, I followed Donald Bell’s instructions to set up a WD Pi Drive Node Zero (Pi MusicBox 0.7.0RC4) - getting access to files on the hard drive and playing music works well (other than on my samsung S7 phone having to use IP address rather than http://musicbox.local).

I’ve had problems when it comes to streaming music stored on my phone through DLNA. Firstly, my phone just doesn’t see musicbox as an available player, so I installed Bubbleupnp. At first I still couldn’t see musicbox as a renderer so I checked using SSH - the upmpdcli service was running ok. To see if it made a difference I restarted the service - bingo - musicbox is visible to Bubbleupnp and I can stream music. That lasted for about 15 minutes… If I restart the service I have access again.

One other observation - I haven’t set up a static IP address for the RPi yet - the IP address seems to jump around a lot, maybe every half hour/hour - is that normal? I’ll get round to setting up a static IP address soon to fix this anyway.

Any thoughts on the behaviour of upmpdcli?

Glad to hear someone making good use of Donald’s excellent work.

Sounds like it’d be worth disabling the firewall and seeing if that makes a difference, potentially with both problems. Once you boot, run the following commands:

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -F
iptables -X

I’ve been too lazy to release rc5/final which has some general firewall fixes, one of which might help with IP address renewals being blocked. I’ll make an effort to do that this week.

Thanks for the quick reply,

I’ll give that a go at home this evening…

1 Like

Some progress made… once I’ve rebooted, and followed the steps suggested:

  • My Samsung S7 Edge can now see “musicbox” as an available renderer
  • I can stream music stored on phone to musicbox and hear it playing :slight_smile:
  • I don’t like the Samsung interface for this on the S7 so I’ve been using the bubbleupnp app
  • The renderer still disappears every now and again - Limited testing so far but certainly if I exit bubbleupnp app (>menu>exit rather than switching to a different screen or hitting back button) I can’t see musicbox available when I next open bubbleupnp

I’ll test a bit more this evening to see if I can see a pattern to when/why it stops working.

I think I saw in another thread some advice you gave on where to add the firewall disabling code - I’ll give that a go (as well as making the IP address static)

Another update - I’ve set the network to a static IP address and disabled the firewall as described here:

This seems to have made musicbox/the network connection much more stable. I’ve been using a combination of the MopidyMobile app for general control as I prefer the interface to going directly to the musicbox IP address (mainly the behaviour of hitting the back button on the mobile whilst browsing for files).

As an aside… as a complete beginner in setting up an RPi I was happy I stumbled across Midnight Commander for editing the rc.local file - a really useful tool for editing files.

Thanks for your help, I’ll look out for RC5!

Andy