To those still running LMS on an old NAS, or with an ancient version of piCorePlayer - please, just upgrade and, while you're about it, consider upgrading to a Pi 4.
I'd been running LMS doggedly on my ReadyNAS NV+ v2 for years as it was surely the right thing to do, being on top of the filestore. It was sluggish, and took ages to scan the library. Finally, in summer 2018, I thought I'd try a Pi 3B+. At the time, it was piCorePlayer 3.5.0 with LMS 7.9.x. Installation & configuration felt rather flakey, but I got there in the end. Performance was a revelation, compared with the ReadyNAS - chalk and cheese. Better still, I was able to use my Pi as another music player, as well as my LMS server - awesome. Then, recently, another issue had been hitting me after occaisional power losses. While the Pi would start up fine, the NAS would need a manual power up, and so was unavailable to the freshly booted Pi - result: support grief from my wife when the "radio doesn't work". I decided to move to an "internal" music library on a 512GB USB 3 drive. While not as elegant as using the NAS, I have scripts that keep the two in sync. The real benefit is that the Pi is no longer dependent on an external file store to work. However, the USB drive was stuck at USB2 speeds on the Pi 3B+. That prompted me to give a try with the Pi 4 to get USB 3 speeds and a possible performance boost too. Boy was I surprised! The Pi 4 is noticably faster still than the Pi 3B+ and, along with the USB 3 drive, runs like a rocket. A full library scan in 9 mins, or a rescan in under 1 min - this used to take a couple of hours on the ReadyNAS, and just under an hour on the Pi 3B+. I was also worried that the Pi 4 would use more power and run hotter, after early reports of high temperatures. No problem, the Pi 4 runs just as cool as the Pi 3 B+, and draws the same power. Best of all, the latest versions of piCorePlayer are much easier to install, with 'step by step instructions' (https://docs.picoreplayer.org/how-to/), including how to set up LMS. So quick and easy that I'd happily re-install now if I had any problem. Thanks to the continued work from the people here who keep this development going, I have an awesome solution at pocket money price, which continues to get better. To anyone still putting up with old hardware - just don't! It's so cheap and so easy. Server: LMS 8.0.0 on piCorePlayer 6.1.0 on Pi 4B 2GB with library on 512GB USB drive Listening on: 2 x Squeezebox Radios, and direct from the server using a Behringer UCA202 USB audio interface ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AlecSp's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=42763 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=113282 _______________________________________________ Squeezecenter mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/squeezecenter
