LMS and Squeezelite for Raspberry Pi

[bfny]

Thanks for the comments on the Ethernet issue. My Pi5 4GB arrived and it's all set up.
Using the IRasptek basic kit - Pi5 4GB, 27W power supply, and active cooling heatsink - $84 at Amazon.
It's amazingly fast, but the biggest surprise - in this application, the 5 uses less power than the 3B+!

I saw an article (Article link) about how the 2GB version has a new processor chip that removed commands the Pi never uses, makes the chip run cooler, and cost less. There was speculation about whether this would also be done to 4 GB model going forward, so maybe that's part of it?
I know the power use is miniscule to begin with. At even high priced electric rates, say 20 cents/kW, it costs $5 / 8 (pi5 / Pi3B+) per year to run 24/7. But heh, I'll take it.

Here are the numbers using 120V 60Hz power, measured with a "kill-a-watt" via AC outlet. With power supply energized, but no load, both switching power units units measure 0 W.
Pi 3B+ - 5W serving music from a 500 GB Samsung SSD USB drive
Pi 5 4GB - 3W serving music from same drive above.

Music scan times, ~500 GB, Total Tracks: 20,946, Total Artists: 3,264
Pi 3B+ - 34 min. 32 bit OS
Pi 5 - 8 mins 64 bit OS

Passive Heatsink temps -
Pi 3B+ - 40C playing music, with Cana kit individual heatsinks
Pi 5 - 40C playing music with IRasptek active cooling heatsink, on M2.5 standoffs, no enclosure.. The fan only runs on boot up.

Overall, successful replacement of the old win 10 laptop serving LMS. Better on all fronts.

 

[MikeyFresh]

Thanks for the comments on the Ethernet issue. My Pi5 4GB arrived and it's all set up.
Using the IRasptek basic kit - Pi5 4GB, 27W power supply, and active cooling heatsink - $84 at Amazon.
It's amazingly fast, but the biggest surprise - in this application, the 5 uses less power than the 3B+!

I saw an article (Article link) about how the 2GB version has a new processor chip that removed commands the Pi never uses, makes the chip run cooler, and cost less. There was speculation about whether this would also be done to 4 GB model going forward, so maybe that's part of it?
I know the power use is miniscule to begin with. At even high priced electric rates, say 20 cents/kW, it costs $5 / 8 (pi5 / Pi3B+) per year to run 24/7. But heh, I'll take it.

Here are the numbers using 120V 60Hz power, measured with a "kill-a-watt" via AC outlet. With power supply energized, but no load, both switching power units units measure 0 W.
Pi 3B+ - 5W serving music from a 500 GB Samsung SSD USB drive
Pi 5 4GB - 3W serving music from same drive above.

Music scan times, ~500 GB, Total Tracks: 20,946, Total Artists: 3,264
Pi 3B+ - 34 min. 32 bit OS
Pi 5 - 8 mins 64 bit OS

Passive Heatsink temps -
Pi 3B+ - 40C playing music, with Cana kit individual heatsinks
Pi 5 - 40C playing music with IRasptek active cooling heatsink, on M2.5 standoffs, no enclosure.. The fan only runs on boot up.

Overall, successful replacement of the old win 10 laptop serving LMS. Better on all fronts.

Thats awesome performance and miserly power consumption by any standard, let alone to what the typical music servers of old required. The low cost Raspberry Pi hardware is truly excellent for this application, and pCP is absolutely fantastic freeware.

 

[bfny]

For fun, and a salute to DIY tradition, I put the Pi5 in an Altoids tin. Actually, 2 lids.
keeps the dust out and keeps the air flowing for passive cooling mode.

 

[airdronian]

Over the last four months or so, streaming playback has been affected by truncation (for lack of a better word).

Tracks would stop before the end and advance to the next track. It was intermittent, but has been happening more frequently. Lately, on occasion a track will pause - and bounce a few seconds up and back. There’s no output when that happens, fortunately.

The Pi 5 server is connected via Ethernet and the Wiim Ultra endpoint is on our Wifi 6 network.

Since the system had worked flawlessly since the Wiim went in, I am wondering if the micro sd card of the LMS is beginning to fail. I don’t think it was new when I installed it. And it runs 24/7.

I’ll rebuild the LMS box soon with a new card, and with any luck the problem vanishes. Faster card this time.

 

[MikeyFresh]

Over the last four months or so, streaming playback has been affected by truncation (for lack of a better word).

Tracks would stop before the end and advance to the next track. It was intermittent, but has been happening more frequently. Lately, on occasion a track will pause - and bounce a few seconds up and back. There’s no output when that happens, fortunately.

The Pi 5 server is connected via Ethernet and the Wiim Ultra endpoint is on our Wifi 6 network.

Since the system had worked flawlessly since the Wiim went in, I am wondering if the micro sd card of the LMS is beginning to fail. I don’t think it was new when I installed it. And it runs 24/7.

I’ll rebuild the LMS box soon with a new card, and with any luck the problem vanishes. Faster card this time.

Have you tried updating everything in the pCP interface? Is this only when streaming local library tracks, or does it happen with Qobuz too?

 

[airdronian]

Have you tried updating everything in the pCP interface? Is this only when streaming local library tracks, or does it happen with Qobuz too?

I did the update to the latest LMS version a while ago. I believe everything is current but I can check again.

I’ve seen this happen before but it’s rectified itself.

Of note is that there’s been a raft of Qobuz plugin updates in the last month or so. Where it was only occasional before. They may be chasing a bug.

The card is in my control at least. This will give me a chance to mess around.

 

[airdronian]

Have you tried updating everything in the pCP interface? Is this only when streaming local library tracks, or does it happen with Qobuz too?

There were some libraries to update so that's done. One thing I find is a setting in the Castbridge options that might address this sort of issue:



The thing is, the Wiim is a squeezelite client and not Chromecast. That's an easy change on the Wiim, so I have set for underrun as above and will run the Wiim as a Chromecast client. Will be interesting to see if that changes anything, and it's easily reversible. I won't get 24/192 streams but that's OK.

Edit: 1st track as a Chromecast endpoint lasted 1:57 before stalling out. In fact it's worse than before. Time to rebuild on a new micro sd.

 

[MikeyFresh]

There were some libraries to update so that's done. One thing I find is a setting in the Castbridge options that might address this sort of issue:

View attachment 107534

The thing is, the Wiim is a squeezelite client and not Chromecast. That's an easy change on the Wiim, so I have set for underrun as above and will run the Wiim as a Chromecast client. Will be interesting to see if that changes anything, and it's easily reversible. I won't get 24/192 streams but that's OK.

That will be interesting to see, I have only sparsely used the WiiM devices as Chromecast endpoints. I would think the Squeezelite operating mode would work better/be more stable than the Castbridge plugin.

For what it's worth I'm not having any of the issues you have described on my Pi 5 instance of pCP, suggesting that yours might have been corrupted in some way, perhaps from a less than orderly shutdown due to a sudden power outage, or the microSD card having issues, which as you know is not unheard of.

While I have a bunch of good microSD cards from the likes of SanDisk, Samsung, Toshiba, Transcend, Western Digital, Kingston, etc. I find the SanDisk Ultra and Extreme to be a great combination of fast, reliable, and relatively inexpensive. I always insist on the retail packaged version to avoid counterfeits which unfortunately are rampant even on Amazon.

 

[airdronian]

That will be interesting to see, I have only sparsely used the WiiM devices as Chromecast endpoints. I would think the Squeezelite operating mode would work better/be more stable than the Castbridge plugin.

For what it's worth I'm not having any of the issues you have described on my Pi 5 instance of pCP, suggesting that yours might have been corrupted in some way, perhaps from a less than orderly shutdown due to a sudden power outage, or the microSD card having issues, which as you know is not unheard of.

While I have a bunch of good microSD cards from the likes of SanDisk, Samsung, Toshiba, Transcend, Western Digital, Kingston, etc. I find the SanDisk Ultra and Extreme to be a great combination of fast, reliable, and relatively inexpensive. I always insist on the retail packaged version to avoid counterfeits which unfortunately are rampant even on Amazon.

My latest test showed it's worse than before. I think it's a Sandisk Ultra in there, but it's nowhere near new. I am trying a Samsung Evo this time around.

 

[Thermionics]

Rebuilt my circa 2014 Intel low-power server (which hosted my LMS instance and music library) from Windows Server 2016 Essentials to Windows Server 2022 on newer hardware and while I was at it, upgraded from Logitech Music Server to Lyrion Music Server. Much improved experience on the newer OS and LMS layer, and it doesn't hurt that the CPU went from an 8-core C2758 Atom to a 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX laptop CPU (Minisforum BD795i SE motherboard).

 

[gable]

Is your LMS system running on a Pi?

Thank's to Jeff Geerling's video, I've put a nvme board on my Shop/Lab computer, which is a Pi5 16g. These are much more reliable drives than the little SD cards.

Cheers~

 

[bfny]

To airdronian on regardig post 537 above, music files skipping on Pi 5 server -
Misc. ramblings of things to try - I also hate when things don't "just work".
Assuming you are using the PicorePlayer, you can take a peek at the updates page on the "main" web page, to see if
there are pCP patch or minor updates, and what your version is. Current here is 10.0.0 web build 10.005
Maybe you already know this, but you can make an iso copy of your current player also from that same page, and go to the diagnostics page to see if anything unusual pops out there.
I assume your music files are on another SSD / rotating drive, not the SD card. If that is a windows format, you can do a shutdown, unplug the drive and check it for errors under windows or wherever you loaded it.
How big is your SD card file system? This was a point of confusion for me in setting up pCP, but I know of it's too small with a large number of music files, you need to increase it
I would also say, in general, sometimes I have devices that have spotty wifi performance, and re-booting the main router/wifi DHCP server device usually helps.
Last you could see if streaming from a FLAC provider like Radio Paradise thru LMS also gives problems.

 

[MikeyFresh]

I did the update to the latest LMS version a while ago. I believe everything is current but I can check again.

A few weeks ago (if memory serves) I did have trouble over a 3-4 day period with an available LMS update that kept failing, actually it never got off the ground as the button/link typically found in the LMS update interface that says "pCP users go here" (or something to that effect) was simply missing, and instead a bunch of gibberish (to me) appearing in quotation marks appeared whenever I tried to apply that update. I hoped it would self resolve and it eventually did, about 3-4 days later after making another attempt at that update the link for pCP users was there, and I was able to complete that LMS update:

Now running Lyrion Music Server Version: 9.0.3 - 1759466965 @ Fri Oct 3 05:04:51 UTC 2025

 

[airdronian]

To airdronian on regardig post 537 above, music files skipping on Pi 5 server -
Misc. ramblings of things to try - I also hate when things don't "just work".
Assuming you are using the PicorePlayer, you can take a peek at the updates page on the "main" web page, to see if
there are pCP patch or minor updates, and what your version is. Current here is 10.0.0 web build 10.005
Maybe you already know this, but you can make an iso copy of your current player also from that same page, and go to the diagnostics page to see if anything unusual pops out there.
I assume your music files are on another SSD / rotating drive, not the SD card. If that is a windows format, you can do a shutdown, unplug the drive and check it for errors under windows or wherever you loaded it.
How big is your SD card file system? This was a point of confusion for me in setting up pCP, but I know of it's too small with a large number of music files, you need to increase it
I would also say, in general, sometimes I have devices that have spotty wifi performance, and re-booting the main router/wifi DHCP server device usually helps.
Last you could see if streaming from a FLAC provider like Radio Paradise thru LMS also gives problems.

This was/is a PiCorePlayer install. The symptoms described were on streaming and (I think) local files as well. The thing was fully patched.

Anyway I did a clean install on a different card and had a showstopper issue - LMS would not start. The root cause of that appeared to be the slimserver.tcz extension file was failing an md5 check when installing. That wasn't my doing - these were files from the repositories (both US and EU). I gave up on Sunday.

By Monday the issue had resolved itself - removing and reinstalling LMS worked right away (md5 check passed) and I was off to the races.

Fully configured it and took an image with the PiCorePlayer's built in utility. Wrote that to the new Samsung card and everything works great now. Best of all I have a fully configured image for future disaster recovery. (like I should have done before).

 

[U47]

Computer Dummy Here-

Mike transformed my digital music enjoyment by a factor of about 8 this evening. He hand held me through the process of adding the Raspberry Pi 5 to my Wiim Ultra for better searching, etc..
Great thanks to MikeyFresh for helping me out again!

It all started out with my first sighting of the copper case for the pi a few weeks ago. I HAD to have one. Thinking about commissioning DeSalvo for a Bronze case now :-)

Love the LMS. Have a lot to learn. Glad I did not go for Roon.

Rich

 

[MikeyFresh]

Computer Dummy Here-

Mike transformed my digital music enjoyment by a factor of about 8 this evening. He hand held me through the process of adding the Raspberry Pi 5 to my Wiim Ultra for better searching, etc..
Great thanks to MikeyFresh for helping me out again!


Rich

My pleasure Rich, I'm glad you can now better enjoy your local music library with the vastly superior server function of LMS via piCorePlayer! Your WiiM Ultra can now just coast along as a Squeezelite endpoint player connected to your DAC, while the RPi 5 does the server side heavy lifting.

 

[Limberpine]

Mike helped me get setup last night Running LMS on my RPi4 with an external SSD.

SO GOOD! And whats crazy is LMS is bringing my SSD music and Favorite artist's from Qobuz into the same Artist tab, so its easy to find things I want to listen to.

Note we did have to mess around with the output setting to make sure we got the right sound card, which took a little bit of sleuthing, but ultimately we got it to work with my Abbas 4.0 DAC!

 

[Limberpine]

Computer Dummy Here-

Mike transformed my digital music enjoyment by a factor of about 8 this evening. He hand held me through the process of adding the Raspberry Pi 5 to my Wiim Ultra for better searching, etc..
Great thanks to MikeyFresh for helping me out again!

It all started out with my first sighting of the copper case for the pi a few weeks ago. I HAD to have one. Thinking about commissioning DeSalvo for a Bronze case now :-)

Love the LMS. Have a lot to learn. Glad I did not go for Roon.

Rich

View attachment 109193

Thats a fancy RPi box!

 

[MikeyFresh]

Thats a fancy RPi box!

I knew there had to be at least one other person on Earth (besides me) willing to put a $75 circuit board into a $300 enclosure.

 

[airdronian]

A while after the LMS rebuild I started getting the odd track stopping before the end again. That was puzzling. I went thru the settings again and made a change that has seemed to help.

Server Settings -> Network -> Streaming Mode for HTTP(S) - changed from "Normal Streaming" to "Cache HTTP(S) streams to disk". In my case system data is assigned to an NVME ssd, and I believe the cache is using that.