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piCorePlayer & LMS on an RPi B+

cpt_paranoia

cpt_paranoia

Addicted Member
Whilst I've had LMS running nicely on my little Atom/Win7 SBC for some time, I've been wanting to play with it running under piCorePlayer, if only to keep up with the Pi fun and games...

Now, the only Pi I had to hand was a 2014 RPi 1 B+ v1.2 I bought some years ago. Plus a uSD card lying around.

So I followed the guide:

https://docs.picoreplayer.org/getting-started/

Downloaded the 32-bit v8.0.0 image, and burnt it to uSD using Win32DiskImager.

Plugged in an HDMI monitor, Ethernet and powered it up first time. HDMI console came up, showing boot progress and IP address. The web interface came up soon after, and its Squeezelite player appeared on my other LMS instance.

Once I figured out that the advanced settings need you to select the 'Beta' tab at the bottom of the web UI page, I increased the size of partition 2, and installed LMS. Since I wanted to access my NAS media file server, I also installed the additional file systems. I added a mount point to the music share on my NAS. And started LMS.

After a short wait, the LMS UI came up at port 9000 of the PCP IP address. I went through the basic LMS setup, and then set up the plugins, in particular, the Material Skin UI. Rebooted LMS, and the Material Skin UI came up, replacing the basic LMS UI.

I had noticed that no players were available; I thought this was down to not having the various bridge plugins available, so I enabled the Airplay, Chromecast & UPnP/DLNA bridge plugins. And rebooted.

Hmmmm... UI didn't come back up. Rebooted PCP, and the console reported an invalid LMS configuration file. I deleted the LMS cache and config file via the PCP UI, and rebooted. LMS came up, and I configured it again. But the options for third party plugins weren't offered. Sigh...

Uninstalled LMS from the PCP UI (no command line required yet), re-installed it, restarted and reconfigured it and its plugins. Back it came, with the Material Skin.

This time, I just enabled the UPnP plugin, as I had a suspicion the CCA plugin was the problem. Still no players, even after enabling the 'Local Player' plugin. Then I realised that 'Manage Players' allows you to take players back from other LMS instances; seems they get 'owned' by an LMS instance. And they give up the ownership if they reboot.

So, I've now got to the point that I have PCP and LMS installed and running on the old v1 B+ RPi.

But...

I haven't managed to get the NAS mount to connect yet. The exact same path spec works fine for mapping a network drive on Windows (allowing for slash/backslash difference). This means I can't evaluate how fast or slow LMS runs on this old Pi, especially with my fairly large (80k track) collection.

And I'm reluctant to try adding CCA and Airplay in case it breaks the configuration again... Fairly easy to reconstruct, but tedious.

So, on the one hand, some positive things, with the image coming up first time, and everything configured via the PCP UI; no command line stuff needed so far. On the other hand, some teething troubles with NAS/CIFS shares and plugins. Some work to do...
 
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cpt_paranoia said:
some teething troubles with NAS/CIFS shares
Click to expand...

After a bit of digging, which required logging in via SSH and looking at the dmesg log, it looks like my NAS is using CIFS 2.0, and the PCP kernel defaults to CIFS 3.0, so it couldn't log in to the NAS SMB/CIFS server.

[ 1045.806198] CIFS: VFS: Could not allocate crypto sha512

The answer was to add 'vers=2.0' to the options field when creating the mount point in the PCP UI LMS tab. The option has to be the first, before the uid and pid options added automatically by PCP.

Now scanning my media...

Hmmm... just checked my NAS smb config file. It does support SMB3... Maybe the PCP is lacking a sha512 algorithm?
 
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It's struggling to scan my media; keeps getting stuck discovering directories, at around 82000 files.

And hitting 'abort scan' doesn't abort the scan.

Trying a different tack by using more granularity in the scan folder definition. That's still getting stuck, after only 429 files.

On the verge of giving up with this experiment, as the inconsistent behaviour, and failure to respond to the controls (abort) is rather frustrating and time-consuming. Rebooting pCP doesn't kill the scan either (that's good if the scan is working normally, but bad if it crashes...)

Not sure if the problem is with the old RPi, or with the s/w. It has managed to proceed further with the scan, but its currently not behaving at all well.

I was hoping this thread might end up as a simple guide to installing and running piCorePlayer and LMS on a Pi, but it's not turning out that way...
 
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Like @chicks I have pCP LMS running on a Pi4. Initially I had it connecting to my Windows Media Server's shared folder, CIFS / NAS, with about 15000 tracks. It took it approx 1/2 hour to index them and I had no issues.

Right now I'm running it with a 1 TB WD External HDD with the same 15000 tracks. Indexing that took roughly the same 1/2 hour and it works quite well.

I suspect that pCP with LMS may be a bit much for the Pi B. Asking the folks on the Slim Devices forum should get you a solid answer.

Mark Gosdin
 
chicks said:
I'm running my pCP LMS server on a Pi 4, with no
Click to expand...

As above, I'm running LMS on an Atom/Win7 without issues, too.

I'll try to borrow a more modern Pi from work (we use dozens of them). That's the advantage of being able to just plug in the uSD card...

I'm quite happy to accept it's the ancient Pi. It's the inconsistent behaviour that bothers me...
 
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yockmyer said:
That makes two of us.... Still reading up on pCP and LMS.
Click to expand...

It's actually very straightforward to setup; it was all plain sailing until the scan, with the little SMB version hiccup. If you have a Pi, just give it a go.

I think I'm just asking a bit much of the limited old Pi...
 
Giving it another go.

Cleared LMS cache & libraries.
Setup LMS again: selected just one small folder of media, disabled unwanted plugins, added just the Material Skin plugin, restarted.
Set Material Skin as UI.
It successfully scanned the folder. Adding more media folders, one by one, starting with the small ones.
Will work my way up to the big folders. Sticking to FLAC sources first. Will try more diverse file types later.

Okay. logging in via SSH whilst scanning, and using top, I see the free memory falling, and cache rising. Then LMS stopped, top stopped responding, and eventually responded to ctrl-c, whereupon LMS was gone, and the free mem looking healthy.
Looks like there isn't enough memory.

Resizing FS to full 32GB card (was 2GB)

pCP & LMS came back up. Scan completed. 4456 tracks. ~ 1/20th of my library. Now to try a rescan to add some more small folders...
 
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@cpt_paranoia
I am also getting myself a pCP system. Are you running pCP player and LMS on one RPi? From what I have been reading online, it's best to separate LMS and player.
 
piCorePlayer is an instance of Tiny Core Linux. LMS and Squeezelite run under that. So you need pCP to run LMS. You can disable Squeezelite, but, as I'm not trying to play anything yet, it's not using resources.

It finished the big folder scan (37k files) in 2 hours last night. Currently adding some more fairly big folders. If it manages those, it will be done. I'll add the player bridge plugins, and check the memory footprint.

All folders scanned. Currently caching artwork.

The memory usage is rather high; peaking at around 480M, with free down to 5M. You can watch the memory management burp, and spit a load out to cache (running at about 275M), and free mem recover a bit.

Scan complete. Memory usage dropped to 250M used, 250M free, 93M cached. CPU ~5%

Added UPnP/DLNA bridge plugin. Restarted. All came up nicely again.
Mem used: 434M, free 53M, cache 260M. Actually, memory seems quite dynamic: currently 465M/170M/300M.
CPU less than 20% whilst playing.
Music selection UI reasonably responsive, considering there are ~6500 albums, ~78k tracks & ~13k artists.
Currently playing to the local Squeezelite, via the simple PWM headphone output. Which really isn't terrible at all...

So I'm not sure what the 'fix' was. There are three options:
1. using individual media folders, rather than top level
2. expanding file system to the entire card
3. not installing plugins until scan complete

My guess is 2 and 3 most likely. I did note that it really struggled when parsing my playlists (which are all play history, from the last decade or so), because it couldn't find many of the tracks, as they have moved around from drive to drive.

But the upshot is that I have pCP 8.0.0 and LMS 8.2.0 running on a single-core, 512M RPi 1 B+. You can buy them secondhand for about £10.
 
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As an aside, I am hoping that once set up, I will be able to set up my pi and the 1 TB WD external HD attached to it as some sort of NAS so that I can access those attached flac files on my garage and patio setups. That's my primary goal. I am happy with Volumio in every way except the streaming issue,

And it's fun to monkey with the pi 4. :)
 
yockmyer said:
I will be able to set up my pi and the 1 TB WD external HD attached to it as some sort of NAS so that I can access those attached flac files on my garage and patio setups.
Click to expand...

One of the pCP options is to add a SAMBA server (it's done via the LMS tab on the pCP UI).

The advantage of LMS, as a media server, is that it can stream to any player on the network, be that a Squeeze media, UPnP/DLNA, Airplay or Chromecast renderer, using the bridge plugins. So unless your media player in the garage/patio needs to access a NAS file system, you don't need a SAMBA server. Of course, it's a nice idea to make the Pi provide NAS file services, too, if you've got a large USB drive connected to it...
 
Think I've resolved the SMB version issue; the note on the pCP page says the Linux kernel defaults to vers 3.0, and versions must be specified. I assumed this meant I didn't need to specify version if I wanted v 3.

But I've now explicitly selected vers=3.0 and rebooted pCP, and it appears to have mounted successfully, and LMS is serving music without problem.

So looks like a bit of confusing wording.
 
I installed picoreplayer, selecting USB Audio as output (Emotiva XDA-2). I can't figure out what to insert in the blank "Output Setting"? Thanks for any help...

Jim
 
This looks handy:

https://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?109217-piCorePlayer-and-USB-Audio

The last post on that page says to run squeezelite -l from the command line. I'm in via SSH, and that works, and gives a whole bunch of options, having just plugged in a cheap, generic USB DAC.

hw:CARD=DAC,DEV=0

sounds the most likely option. Just tried that with mine; working okay.

The PCP UI said I needed to reboot, but, since I'm in the middle of a rescan (see below...), I didn't want to do that. Seems to be working fine anyway...

Actually, i notice that under the pCP Tweaks tab, there's a USB Audio tweak for the XMC-1. I wonder if it's needed for the XMC-2...
 
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Since I wanted to recover the 32GB uSD card for something more 'useful', and use a 4GB uSD card I found in the street, I just did a complete re-install. Couldn't be bothered trying to figure out how to resize the partition or image.

Having done the process a couple of times, now, it all seemed to go swimmingly. I only set the file system to 2GB this time. I made clear notes in my 'logfile' at each step this time. I'll try to format them nicely and post on the thread, and maybe ask a mod to either shove them into the OP, or add a link the the new post.

Currently scanning my media on the new install.

Scan finished without a hitch.

Is using about 1.3G of the allocated 2G. Most of that is artist pictures and cached artwork; it was using about 200M after scanning media.
 
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Got PCP installed and it seems to be running fine with nothing done to the "Output Setting". Sounds good! Is there a way to change the UI? I really like the tiled "ARTIST" and "ALBUM" look of Volumio.
Long list of plug-ins for sure.
 
cpt_paranoia said:
This looks handy:

https://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?109217-piCorePlayer-and-USB-Audio

The last post on that page says to run squeezelite -l from the command line. I'm in via SSH, and that works, and gives a whole bunch of options, having just plugged in a cheap, generic USB DAC.

hw:CARD=DAC,DEV=0

sounds the most likely option. Just tried that with mine; working okay.

The PCP UI said I needed to reboot, but, since I'm in the middle of a rescan (see below...), I didn't want to do that. Seems to be working fine anyway...

Actually, i notice that under the pCP Tweaks tab, there's a USB Audio tweak for the XMC-1. I wonder if it's needed for the XMC-2...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info and that link. At this point, it's a little too technical but it's what I like about the Pi 4. Volumio on one card and work on PCP on another. Great flexibilty.
 
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