I’m building a box around a Pi 3 and a DAC+ that’ll be used almost exclusively for playing back music from a dedicated USB drive.
I started out reusing the drive that had been connected to the Pi 3 before the project, which was one of WD’s now-deceased PiDrive line - a 1TB 2.5” drive with a wall wart with a Y-cable for power, with one side going to the drive and the other a Micro-USB for the Pi 3. It had worked without problems for years, and the drive was formatted as a standard bootable Pi drive, with a FAT partition for boot, a dedicated swap partition, and two ext4 partition for the root partition and user directories. I flashed the SD card with the current moOde version, and rebooted the machine (headless). After the expected initialization delay, I was able to access the web interface.
I wasn’t sure what to expect with the local drive on first boot. I could see the default streaming stations, and ssh’ing into the machine showed all four partitions mounted. I uncounted those, removed the partition table then, as a test, reformatted the drive as a single big partition (ext4), rebooted, then did regenerate the database, and rebooted again. When I ssh’ed in, the external drive was mounted as ‘/media/whatever-the-UUID-was’ and under /mnt there was now SDCARD and NAS. Since I didn’t have any NAS set up, I was slightly surprised, while SDCARD contained the stereo test file.
At this point I hit a wall - I could move anything onto the drive, but I’ve not been able to find a guide as to how a drive is best laid out. So I copied a FLAC and a CUE file onto the drive, rebuilt the database, and rebooted.
Still nothing. I’ve got two main suspicions:
1. That the wall wart was adequate for the drive and Pi 3, but not for the additional drain from the hat.
2. I didn’t have a clue on how I should have the drive set up.
For the first, I decided to spend a little, and I’ve ordered a powered drive enclosure and proper drive to replace the PiDrive, plus an 18W power supply for the Pi. However, it’ll be Wednesday until I can try those out.
However, I figured I can ask about the second one. Is there a best file system type to use? Since my day-to-day machine is a Mac, hfs+ would seem simplest, especially for moving files off the Mac, but is support for this built-in to the kernel?
Next, what is the best way to organize the external drive? I’ve played around with Plex and Jellyfin, where having one directory per artist with one subdir per-release, containing one file per track seems to be the norm. I can certainly do that while copying the files to the drive as I’m also in the process of trying to create a robust, bit-perfect copy of my music collection. I’m re-ripping all of my CDs into single FLAC files with separate CUE files, then burning these to 100GB BD-XL M-DISCs. It’s trivial to transcode these into file-per-track FLACs, though - just a bit slow as I’m midway through my 6th BD-XL, with probably another three or four to do.
So, short-version - is there a best practice for the layout of songs on the local drive, and can that drive be HFS+ formatted? There may also be drive power issues, but I hope those will magically disappear when I switch to a self-powered external drive.
Thanks in advance for any tips. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to have top-notch audio quality again - I’ve been stuck with lossy audio for 20 years, but added Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones recently. No lossless wireless or spatial audio because, well, Sony’s proprietary tendencies make Apple look like the FSF, but with the headphones in wired mode, I should at least be able to listen to the 24/96 audio I’ve got.
I started out reusing the drive that had been connected to the Pi 3 before the project, which was one of WD’s now-deceased PiDrive line - a 1TB 2.5” drive with a wall wart with a Y-cable for power, with one side going to the drive and the other a Micro-USB for the Pi 3. It had worked without problems for years, and the drive was formatted as a standard bootable Pi drive, with a FAT partition for boot, a dedicated swap partition, and two ext4 partition for the root partition and user directories. I flashed the SD card with the current moOde version, and rebooted the machine (headless). After the expected initialization delay, I was able to access the web interface.
I wasn’t sure what to expect with the local drive on first boot. I could see the default streaming stations, and ssh’ing into the machine showed all four partitions mounted. I uncounted those, removed the partition table then, as a test, reformatted the drive as a single big partition (ext4), rebooted, then did regenerate the database, and rebooted again. When I ssh’ed in, the external drive was mounted as ‘/media/whatever-the-UUID-was’ and under /mnt there was now SDCARD and NAS. Since I didn’t have any NAS set up, I was slightly surprised, while SDCARD contained the stereo test file.
At this point I hit a wall - I could move anything onto the drive, but I’ve not been able to find a guide as to how a drive is best laid out. So I copied a FLAC and a CUE file onto the drive, rebuilt the database, and rebooted.
Still nothing. I’ve got two main suspicions:
1. That the wall wart was adequate for the drive and Pi 3, but not for the additional drain from the hat.
2. I didn’t have a clue on how I should have the drive set up.
For the first, I decided to spend a little, and I’ve ordered a powered drive enclosure and proper drive to replace the PiDrive, plus an 18W power supply for the Pi. However, it’ll be Wednesday until I can try those out.
However, I figured I can ask about the second one. Is there a best file system type to use? Since my day-to-day machine is a Mac, hfs+ would seem simplest, especially for moving files off the Mac, but is support for this built-in to the kernel?
Next, what is the best way to organize the external drive? I’ve played around with Plex and Jellyfin, where having one directory per artist with one subdir per-release, containing one file per track seems to be the norm. I can certainly do that while copying the files to the drive as I’m also in the process of trying to create a robust, bit-perfect copy of my music collection. I’m re-ripping all of my CDs into single FLAC files with separate CUE files, then burning these to 100GB BD-XL M-DISCs. It’s trivial to transcode these into file-per-track FLACs, though - just a bit slow as I’m midway through my 6th BD-XL, with probably another three or four to do.
So, short-version - is there a best practice for the layout of songs on the local drive, and can that drive be HFS+ formatted? There may also be drive power issues, but I hope those will magically disappear when I switch to a self-powered external drive.
Thanks in advance for any tips. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to have top-notch audio quality again - I’ve been stuck with lossy audio for 20 years, but added Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones recently. No lossless wireless or spatial audio because, well, Sony’s proprietary tendencies make Apple look like the FSF, but with the headphones in wired mode, I should at least be able to listen to the 24/96 audio I’ve got.
