[PROBLEM] Blank screen Library > Tags, Albums

[RPI4 Rambler]

@RPI4 Rambler

Hi, Marco.

We can't give good answers if you don't supply basic information.

Post the output from moodeutl -s. This helps us judge the basic health of your system. (I originally wrote -l but -s gives more complete info.)

Since you are struggling with the MPD library, show us what MPD thinks is in it. Since you're comfortable working from the command line:

Post the actual output from mpc stats.

Post the output from, say, mpc list album (or one of the other major tag fields in your collection such as title, artist, genre). This is the information used to construct the views in the moOdeUI.

The RPi4B is quite capable of indexing large collections but the upper limit depends of various factors. I have a modest collection of ca 6000 tracks and even an RPi0W is happy with it. Others have collections well into the 10K to 20K range. 

How big is yours? If it's into the 30K+ tracks range I think neither moOde nor any other MPD-based player running on an SBC will perform well. If your collection is supersized, you could test the hypothesis that size matters by mounting only of your six NAS shares and checking the result.

There is no call for fiddling with system files such as mpd.conf. The moOdeUI provides access to all the configuration parameters a normal user needs and, as you've discovered, overwrites mpd.conf.

Most users problems with the Library have been traced to their tags. What matters is what MPD and its plugins recognize, not  indexing-status info from a NAS package like minimserver.

Regards,
Kent

Hi Kent,

Thanks for your reply. My collection is much bigger though:

Code:

mpc stats
Artists:  20191
Albums:   18739
Songs:   266810

Play Time:    0 days, 0:00:00
Uptime:       1 days, 1:49:36
DB Updated:   Mon Aug 24 14:35:01 2020
DB Play Time: 827 days, 12:51:11

Off topic to come, though. Some forumistas seem to interpret problems people have with Moode as an attack on the system. Actually, Moode is my favorite, and I tried quite a few.
Now, I have a RPI3B+ as well, running Volumio, and if you don't edit mpd.conf accordingly MPD will crash on all sorts of parameters that are set far too low to handle a library as big as this, guaranteed. There is really a big need to edit mpd.conf in this case, trust me. Some settings implemented in my Moode's mpd.conf are way over default too, like these for instance:

Code:

max_output_buffer_size "131072"
max_connections "128"

The default for max_connections is 10, according to MPD's creators, recommended even. The whole point of editing of mpd.conf (Moode does it automatically all the time) is to make MPD flexible. Volumio will not change mpd.conf to suit the needs of indexing, for instance, but it does change a couple of things according to some UI settings, half-way house as it were. Volumio does not overwrite mpd.conf but edits it. Big difference. However, in Volumio indexing is handled very differently from Moode's so we should let this go.

I strongly disagree with your position that one should not meddle with the innards of a system. So many systems have so many bugs, that you're forced too. I'm beginning to (blasphemy!) hate MPD (especially when the so-called stable version is a lot less stable than the next-up beta) as much as Tim hates NFS, I guess. But then, I have been growing up with DEC's VAX VMS OS, still an amazing OS; I'm still seeing stuff in Linux that has its origins in VMS.

If you would make a comparison of indexing speed between an RPI4 and say, Minimserver on a similarly powered NAS, you'd be amazed.  OK, wayyyyyy off topic now.

My music library has no tagging problems. As I said earlier, Twonky, Minimserver, LMS have no problem whatsoever with my music library as far as tagging or size is concerned. Any robust server system would not, though 10 years ago you might have been right.