Volumio vs LibreElec

1st Official Post

    I've never been entirely convinced by music & audio on Kodi / LibreElec. Not that it sounds bad or that it's especially difficult to play music, web-radio or audiobooks. It's rather that in practical terms playing audio content via a system based around a TV screen and with video playback as the primary focus is a bit wasteful and clumsy. It's a set-up that doesn't really work too well in the situations in which I listen to music & audio. Which is why I was pleased to discover Volumio. An OS which in conjunction with Pi3 and Pi touchscreens is providing the basis of audio systems in my workshop and kitchen.

    However, as great as it is to have no-compromise digital music systems, I can't help thinking that Volumio is a bit bloated and demanding for a music and radio player. Though I imagine it's a bit late for the Volumio developers to change course, I wondered if you could create a better audio system with a JEOS like LE as the basis rather than customising Debian jessie + chrome browser.

    If you gutted the non-essential stuff from LibreElec, created a skin and web interface dedicated to audio, and made the GUI touchscreen-friendly, wouldn't you have something potentially a good deal better than Volumio? Especially as the greater public awareness of and familiarity with Kodi / LibreElec would make it more likely to attract the interest of 3rd party add-on developers. And possibly even official apps from Spotify and the like. Maybe even an embedded music store.

    I'm not implying or demanding that anyone should take up arms and get to work with the above, it's more of a question of curiosity and wishful thinking.

    Thomas

    Have a look at the Yatse (and maybe Kore, haven't tried it since a while) apps. TV can stay off and you just browse through your music library and remotely control kodi from your tablet / phone. Works rather nicely IMO!

    so long,

    Hias

    Thanks for the suggestion, but I've already tried Yatse, Kore and all the other Kodi remote apps. They work OKish for music, but are next to hopeless for web-radio, audiobooks and podcasts. It was the frustration with these clumsy make-do options that lead me to try Volumio + touchscreen. Which works like a normal hi-fi or radio. No need to switch on a TV or hunt for a smartphone. Just tap the touchscreen and away you go.

    Once you try Volumio you realise just how much audio on Kodi is compromised by a structure designed primarily for video content. Don't get me wrong, LibreElec is fantastic for video. I use it everyday for films, shows and live TV. It's just not a great solution for a home hi-fi in a kitchen or bedroom or wherever.

    I just wondered if it'd be possible to make something like Volumio but with a lighter and more robust chassis, and with more chance of mainstream acceptance and 3rd party development.

    Thanks for the suggestion. However, I tried RuneAudio before I settled on Volumio. While RuneAudio is a little less resource hungry, it's not as nice an experience as Volumio. And with no update in over 2 years RuneAudio has the feel of abandonware, and has even less chance of mainstream acceptance and attracting and enthusing 3rd party development.

    The original post wasn't an appeal for recommendations or alternative solutions. More of a theoretical question. Could Kodi / LibreElec provide a better starting point for a lightweight and cross-platform dedicated music system? That was all.

    • Official Post

    I did attempt porting Voumio to LE at one point but gave up on the Apache2 dependency. Nothing to stop you from installing the MPD add-on though (which most of the pi audio distros are based on) and then ignoring the fact that Kodi exists in the background :)

    Thanks for the suggestion. I've never tried the MPD add-on. That'll be tonight's project.

    That said, as nice as it is to keep receiving these suggestions, they aren't really tacking the meat of what is a slightly academic question. I feel that everyone's getting distracted by the bloating issue.

    I was after your opinion as to whether a customised and streamlined Kodi / LibreElec would make a better starting point for an audio player OS than Debian Jessie + chrome browser. I have a feeling that it would, and that an audio player JEOS based on Kodi would have a better chance of succeeding than Volumio. Could be wrong though; usually am.

    Concerning touchscreen: there's the Estouchy Skin for Kodi Kodi Community Forum - Estouchy - I have to admit I never tried it though as I don't have any touchscreens.

    You can disable various main menu entries (like Movies, Videos, ...) in Kodi if you don't want/need them - just head to Settings -> Interface -> Skin -> Configure Skin...

    If you want some extended functionality in Kodi you'll need to check if there's some addon readily available that suits your needs or create a feature request for Kodi if some core functionality needs to be extended.

    LibreELEC is already quite stripped down but if it bothers you that some background processes like pulseaudio, eventlircd, ... are running and you don't want/need them you can simply disable them via "systemctl mask SERVICENAME". A while back ago I did that to repurpose a Wetek Play 1 running LE as a headless tvheadend server - I even disabled kodi as it'd consume a significant amount of CPU and memory when it just sat there being idle.

    As all of these are just configuration changes you can easily check yourself if it brings you nearer to your goal. If you discover that's a viable way to go and you want that config "out of the box" then you could start thinking about creating an LE community build or fork that ships with these changes as default.

    so long,

    Hias

    Just remembered about another audio distro with a stripped-down base (though a different approach than LE uses), piCorePlayer: piCorePlayer

    Not sure if that comes near your needs, never really used it, just helped the folks getting the Cirrus Logic Audio Card working a few months ago.

    so long,

    Hias

    Quote from chewitt

    I confess that it was moOde audio I had a go at porting, not Volumio. An LE image with MPD on its own (no Kodi, less video stuff) came in about 90MB in size which is much nicer than the typical 400MB-1.2GB of debian based things.

    This is what I was getting at. I just have a feeling that the developers of Volumio and other audio OS would be better using LE as a starting point for a dedicated (no compromise) audio OS.

    Edited once, last by Confused: typo (May 14, 2018 at 3:39 PM).

    Quote from HiassofT

    Just remembered about another audio distro with a stripped-down base (though a different approach than LE uses), piCorePlayer: piCorePlayer

    Not sure if that comes near your needs, never really used it, just helped the folks getting the Cirrus Logic Audio Card working a few months ago.

    so long,

    Hias

    Thanks for the many suggestions and ideas. Most of which I've tried at some point or other. But then I'm not looking for a replacement for Volumio. It's about as good as you can get at the moment. I was asking if a dedicated Audio OS based on LE could be better. I suspect that it could. I was after your opinion on that.

    IMHO the role of stripped down OSes is one of the most overrated things - even in embedded system design. Basically it has next to no impact on performance and the only thing you gain is a smaller sized install image - which isn't really important if you install the system on a 8-32GB SD card. Sure, it's relevant if you only have 1GB of embedded flash or even less, but eg in case of RPi this isn't really a thing to worry much about.

    If you compare eg Raspbian Lite to LE you'll notice the Raspbian Lite install image is about 360MB compressed and LE is about 150MB. But, if you look closer you'll also see that Raspbian comes with about 54MB (uncompressed) of kernel modules, LE with about 19MB (again, uncompressed) of them. Yes, they take up space but they might come in handy when you need one of those.

    Then comes the big question: busybox or full-fledged gnu tools. Well, busybox is small but the tools also don't offer the full functionality. That caught the piCoreFolks, busybox modprobe didn't support the "softdep" option. Busybox ash isn't bash so even nowadays where most people are (or should be) aware of the term "bashism" you may come across some script that doesn't work with a standard posix shell because it uses commands specific to bash. Recently we ran into the issue where busybox's mount didn't cope too well with systemd. And so on and so forth, the list is basically endless.

    So, when you design an embedded system / appliance the more important question you should ask yourself is whether you are prepared to put a lot of effort into maintaining a stripped down OS or if it's better to use some other system (like Debian), and eg just tweak the kernel and/or config settings a bit and make sure you install the packages you want and don't install those you don't need.

    As you might have guessed there's no easy answer to that and both approaches have their pros and cons. But,, performance-wise both solutions will be about on par, most CPU time and RAM will be used by the main application - be that Kodi or some node.js scripts.

    so long,

    Hias

    Thank you for the insight. I now understand why Volumio may have opted to go with debian rather than a JEOS.

    Though I'm still wondering if an Audio OS based around Kodi would be a good idea. Something designed specifically and exclusively for audio browsing and playback. The audio-specific GUI accessed via a touchscreen, mobile app or web interface. Absolutely nothing makeshift or compromised to accommodate other forms of media.

    With Kodi's global popularity and developer base, might an Audio OS based around Kodi be more likely to thrive than Volumio? To have a better chance of mainstream acceptance, interesting hardware manufacturers, and attracting both official and voluntary add-on development.

    There are some benefit of a slim system. Less software code has less potentially security issues. Updates procedures are more quick, startup ect... I love Linux systems like Alpine, Void, Arch, LE or OpenWRT compared to other fat and bloated distributions.

    So many thanks to the LE developers at this point.

    IMHO the big benefit of using Kodi is that I can use a single application for listening to my flacs, watch Netflix, play my DVDrips etc.

    There may be different distributions / programs / systems that handle each of these tasks better, but then I'd need to switch between those, adapt to different user interfaces, manage each of them separately etc.

    So, I'm not sure if yet another audio distribution (being it a stripped-down / specialized Kodi or something else) is such a good idea. Improving Kodi seems like a better idea to me. If you don't want video functionality you don't have to use it. But if you later decide otherwise it'll be right there for you.

    so long,

    Hias

    • Official Post
    Quote from Confused

    This is what I was getting at. I just have a feeling that the developers of Volumio and other audio OS would be better using LE as a starting point for a dedicated (no compromise) audio OS.

    Having talked to some of them in the past. Most are individual app developers or very small teams and it's easy to package your app into someone else's distro like Raspbian. Taking that a step further and creating your own embedded distro requires a different set of skills, and while LE is fairly simple to manage (when you know how) it's also a little obscure in how things are packaged and that knowledge takes time to learn. I'd love to see more of those app-distros adopt our codebase (similar to Plex and Lakka) and it would also benefit them by broadening hardware support beyond the Pi ecosystem. The desire or initiative to do that needs to come from their side though, else we end up pushing water uphill.

    Quote from HiassofT

    IMHO the big benefit of using Kodi is that I can use a single application for listening to my flacs, watch Netflix, play my DVDrips etc.

    There may be different distributions / programs / systems that handle each of these tasks better, but then I'd need to switch between those, adapt to different user interfaces, manage each of them separately etc.

    So, I'm not sure if yet another audio distribution (being it a stripped-down / specialized Kodi or something else) is such a good idea. Improving Kodi seems like a better idea to me. If you don't want video functionality you don't have to use it. But if you later decide otherwise it'll be right there for you.

    so long,

    Hias

    Hello Hias,

    Sorry to drag this up again, but I've been thinking about your post and have come to the conclusion that you're right that it'd be better to improve Kodi rather than create a new audio OS.

    Hence these suggestions:

    1. Don't assume that Kodi will be connected to and controlling a TV.

    2. Improve support for Kodi + HiFi by creating both a dedicated touchscreen skin and a dedicated mobile app for audio / music content.

    The lounge - in which we spend most of our time at home - is filled with books, wine and audio & music from a hi-fi. My TV is downstairs in a converted cellar. I don't have a TV in the lounge or any other living spaces.

    In my experiments with using LE as the basis for a hi-fi I've controlled the playback with a connected Pi touchscreen and android remote apps. The problem is that the Kodi skins and apps are structured to primarily support browsing and playback of video. When used to control a hi-fi they are confusing and clumsy, and honestly they just look and feel a bit rubbish.

    With the amazing potential for Kodi / LibreElec to provide the basis of a really great hi-fi system, wouldn't it be a good idea to think about providing simplified user interfaces which are better suited to browsing audio & music and for controlling playback through a hi-fi? With the bonus for me (and others like me) that we no longer have to explain to the significant other and befuddled relatives that the hi-fi definitely and absolutely positively cannot play films and TV shows.

    Thomas