I stopped using Kodi a couple of years back and went to a separate video and audio solution. Now, I’m looking to get back into Kodi for a strictly audio solution and like the idea of an all-in-one box with very little setup required.
The Vero 4k+ running OSMC seems to be this solution. I intend to use the system purely from an iOS app on a tablet/Iphone and not a monitor (I can set up on monitor initially of course). My library is ~ 60k tracks with FLAC.
I’m most concerned about quality and stability. I would like to use the digital audio and analog audio at the same time. Is this supported (I seem to remember this was a problem back in the day with Kodi?)
Also, I want to make sure that speed is not an issue. The skin makes no difference since I will use the Kodi iOS app or Kyra for Kodi on iOS for the interface. In the past I was using an i3-4130T processor/4GB RAM running LibreElec with an SSD. Will it function at least as fast?
Also, can I access it from a desktop/web interface easily to do setup stuff?
Any issues or problems I should be aware of?
Appreciate and advice or feedback from people who are using the Vero for music. Thanks!
Brian
I can’t really answer most of the other stuff but I would add that the audio interface is much better in Kodi 18 than it was previously. I had been sticking with iTunes and using airplay before because I didn’t like Kodi for music much but now I rarely even open iTunes. The only real caveat (especially with a large library) is that to make the scraping work as well as it should and get good info with minimal cleanup, you need to run all of your files through Musicbrainz Picard. It can take a bit to figure out that program but you can set it up so it leaves all your current tags alone and only adds the Musicbrainz id’s which is really the only thing Kodi cares about. My library is ~40k tracks and I think it probably took me 8-10hrs to run my collection through. The upside is that I only had to fix a couple dozen items after scraping in Kodi which is pretty good IMO.
While this may be true, Kodi has never really been a very good at being a music focused solution since it has always been more broadly developed as an all around media player. There are much better solutions available in regards to sound quality and most specifically, archival/presentation/usage as they are actually focused on being music players.
I’m looking for software (and hardware) that will allow me to search for songs by year and be operated by an iPad. I could do Roon for $500 or J. River (and spend lots of time trying to figure out how to make it work) for $60. I already have all the music on an Unraid server.
Kodi does not do this afaik. The search in music does not include dates, the filter function does but with large libraries it is so slow it is unusable. Neither feature is in the official iOS app and I am not aware if it is with any 3rd part Kodi remote. The web interfaces are not really usable for music either. If you only play by album, artist, or genre (which is how I use it) then it works pretty alright. If your looking for something more, especially search features, you might want to keep looking.
That particular feature works just fine in the UI. You can make custom widgets to make custom ones as well which would work. That is not accessible in the remote aps afaik. You may want to install Kodi on a PC and play with a app connected to that to get a sense of the limitations before committing to anything.
There is a web interface and you can use the iOS apps.
The i3 will be faster for the skin; but as you will be using it headless, you won’t notice. My only warning would be that if you’re playing back DSD files, these are quite intensive and the system may struggle with these. FLAC will be fine.
Thanks for the link. I do have hi-res files audio files that are mostly 24/96 which it looks like won’t be a problem. I plan to primarily use the optical and analog out for stereo, so looks like I’ll be okay as far the audio goes.
I have an ipad mini currently (and my iphone)–I’ll try these when I get home. I assume my windows kodi install will be the same as far as operation goes as the OSMC install in the Vero–at least that was my experience with LibreElec in the past.
Yeah…You seem to be correct. I downloaded a half dozen apps (at least) and though Kyra does have a year search it only works for albums. I guess I could just make a playlist for each year and do it that way?
The year search was the main reason I was moving away from my current solution. I could just rename the files/songs with the year included and do a folder search too.
I see the store is out of the Vero right now and there is a place called Chicago Electronic Distributors that seem to offer it in the US. Is this an “authorized” place?
I tested this out with a smart playlist for songs from 1991 (1576 songs) and it pulls up on my system in ~2 seconds and that worked alright. When I pulled that up in the official Kodi iOS remote things kind of fell apart. The artwork had trouble loading after the first hundred or so songs and the full screen in playlist would not pull up the artwork. Oddly enough if I switched over to the currently playing screen the artwork showed there. I kind of expected this as the web interface has a tendency to choke when any list gets to be overly large. If I scrolled through the list very fast it put so much load on my raspberry pi I actually had the audio pause for a millisecond a couple times.
That would not work
Now keep in mind that I am not running a Vero, a local database, or local content so I am not giving a straight comparison to what you are looking at running. That being said, I don’t think i’m that far off either.
EDIT: I may have been a bit premature in my testing. It would seem that I did not have the song thumbnails cached yet and the high CPU and artwork problems were because the poor little Pi was busy doing that. When I tried it again this morning the artwork and stutter problems were gone.
None of this sounds like great news. Part of me wants to give it a try and the other part doesn’t want to deal with the frustration of it not working that well.
Do you have any suggestions as to a better solution?
Am I back to J. River and a DLNA device that works with it?
I don’t. I normally only play my music by album or genre and Kodi works well for that. I still use iTunes a bit like when I want to stream music to my garage, but that system is far from ideal (although the iTunes remote app is actually very functional). I have never actually gone shopping for a new system but the only one I normally hear people gush about is Roon. There is a open source project called Volumio that seems to be well liked that you might look into.
I realize this isn’t really the forum for discussing Volumio, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to test this software. It looks like you need some sort of device to install it on from the start. I can’t just install it on the desktop and try it out?
EDIT: I looked through the documentation and it doesn’t seem to have any sort of “year” sort whatsoever.