 Volumio was one of the popular music players and aggregators for the Raspberry Pi. It started as a free player for consumers while later on manufacturers could have a personalized version for a license fee. With every update new features became available for those that would pay a small monthly fee. The new features become free features when new updates became available. Also here, the universal user interface is now available to those without a subscription while the new features fall under the premium subscription. I'll dive into that in this video. There are Volumio versions available for Raspberry Pi, X68 and X64 and ASUS Thinkerboard. Installation depends on the hardware used. An extensive installation manual can be found on the download page. When you first start with Volumio you can either use the volume app on the smartphone or tablet or type volumio.local in the address bar of your browser. The Volumio user interface is shown and the configuration wizard is automatically run. You are then asked to set the preferred language. There are many languages to choose from, including Dutch, but I won't make things difficult for you and leave it to English. Then you are asked for your Volumio account. I get recognized immediately and my premium account is set, but you don't have to start with a subscription. Just skip this if you don't want to do that. Then you can set a unique name, like this one. This Volumio install runs on the Audiophonics Rust Touch with 7 inch touchscreen, so I named it Volumio Touch. The next time I want to use the browser as a user interface, I simply type volumiotouch.local in the address bar of my browser. Smartphone and tablet users can simply start up the app, for it will detect your player or players automatically and lets you select what player to control. Next you can select the sound card or DAC you have installed. I have the Audiophonics Saber ES9038Q2M sound card that can be used with the 9028 driver. The next step is to log into the streaming service you are subscribed to, if any. As you can see I have my title account already connected. Then you are fully set up. Universal user interface is far more professional looking than the previous ones. Let's start with the menu in the top left corner. The first option is about the Volumio account. You can see I have a premium account so I can show you all the options. The free version is somewhat limited of course. I'll mention the differences later on. You can see I have four Raspberry Pi based Volumio players with quality sound cards. The first has the Allo Boss sound card, the second the Allo Katana board, the third the Audiophonics Rusp Touch with 9038 sound card and the 7 inch touchscreen. And last but not least the Allo USB signature player. To easily identify them, I changed the standard Volumio name into these four names. In normal practice you would use names like living, study, attic and so on. Fullo Katana is switched off as can be seen by the missing green play button. Back to the setup menu where the next item is sources. Here you find everything that has to do with where you get your music from. If you have a USB drive connected to the Pi, you see how many artists, albums and tracks are found in their total playing time. Below that you can enter shared volumes on a computer or NAS in your network. This is the only thing I still don't like in Volumio for neither Windows nor Apple computers nor my NAS are ultimately found and entering an IP address or computer name and share doesn't cut it either. But there is no need for working like this. Just skip that and install a DLNA or UPnP-AV server program on your computer or NAS. It's easier and faster too. I'll show you later on how that works. Below that you can activate a number of functions. The first three are available whether you have a subscription or not. UPnP renderer and DLNA browser are used in combination with the DLNA or UPnP-AV server program on your computer or NAS. SharePoint emulates Apple AirPlay and thus can be used with Apple products. For the following function you do need a premium subscription. Bluetooth input playback, multi-room playback, music metadata discovery, CD playback and ripping and the use of digital and analog inputs provided the hardware offers that. As far as streaming services are concerned, Tidal and Tidal Connect, Cobus and Hi-Res Audio are supported by default. For others, like Spotify, a plugin is available. Then to the playback options. Here you set the output device you use. On this player that is the Audiophonic Saber I mentioned earlier. It is set for DSD native and auto-volume correction to correct for the 6 dB lower output of DSD compared to PCM. Then you can set the audio buffer size, whether the play cue is retained or erased after a power down and how you want new tracks added to your cue. The volume options let you set the mixer type, hardware, software or no volume control, select the volume control if your hardware has more mixers, choose the default volume at startup if you have a power amp directly attached, minimum volume and so on. Resampling can be set here. You can resample to one of three bit-dabs and nine sampling frequencies in four resample qualities. But I miss the option to only do integer upsampling. You don't want 44.1 kHz to get upsampled to 192 kHz but rather to 4 times 44.1 is 176.4 kHz for that doesn't cause rounding errors. Back to the menu. Appearance lets you change the language. You already have said your language the first time you use Volumio, but it can be changed here. There are three user interfaces you can choose from. Simply put, you can select classic if you like the initial Volumio user interface from back in the day. The second generation user interface is named Contemporary and the version 3 interface is called Manifest. In version 3 the latter was only available to premium users. To me it's by far the best of the three and therefore I use it in this video. Back to the menu. I skip network where you change your network settings and systems where the system name, updates, factory reset and credits are located. But I do go to plugins since here you find some interesting options. There is a DSP center, plugins for many streaming services. To have Volumio act as a Roon endpoint or a squeeze box and so on. On the Volumio Touch I have Roon Bridge installed, the Spotify plugin for the grandchildren, the plugin for the special button on the audiophonics rasp touch that lets the Raspberry Pi switch off the decent way, a plugin for a now playing screen and a plugin to have the 7 inch Raspberry Pi touch screen in the rasp touch work. Now we go back to the menu for the last time. At the bottom we see the icons for the alarm clock function, to put the player to sleep, a help function, a basket to pile a subscription and at the bottom the power off and restart button. Selecting music to play is done with this icon. It brings you to an overview of sources as we know from earlier versions of Volumio. The music library brings you to the USB drive or network share if present. I have an SSD drive connected. Let's open that and choose Ellison YA and play a track. You now see at the bottom of the screen what is playing. When I close the browsing window, the cover art, track, title, artist and album name appear. Below the artist name, the file type and sampling info. Under Hard to Market as a favorite, the plus sign to add the track to a playlist and three little dots that send you to this menu with album credits, album story and artist story. The one you choose also appears next to the cover art in the playing screen. The other links bring you to the artist or album. In the lower left corner is the button to go to the play queue. I have talked about DnLay and UPnPav to play music from a share on a computer or NAS. When the DnLay or UPnPav server on the computer or NAS is running, it does the indexing locally and sends only metadata to the Volumio player to choose from. When a playlist, track or album is chosen, the music files are sent to the Volumio player. I have two Synology NASs running with both the standard media server and, specially for music, Minimeserver. This time I choose Minimeserver on the Syn8 to go to artist and select the friend singer Barbara. As you can see, it all goes very smoothly. The same goes for Web Radio, Cobuse and Tidal. Let me show you Tidal and go to the playlist I published earlier. Let's close this down with Tin Pan Alley. Unfortunately I can't switch on the sound for then I lose my rights to this video. But you get the picture. Up till now you could only play the music through the local output of the Volumio player. For premium subscribers there are now alternatives. Let's start with play here. When you control a Volumio device using either a browser on a computer, smartphone or tablet or use the Volumio app, you can play music from the Volumio device over the speakers of your computer, smartphone or tablet. For those into setting up a VPN server at home, it gives the possibility to play music from the Volumio device over the smartphone away from home. The second feature is to group devices. Click on the speaker icon, choose group devices and add the players you want to add. The third option is to cast music from the Volumio device to a Chromecast or Sonos player. It uses HTTP live streaming and is based on HTTP packets and AAC-LC coding. Last but not least, you can control other Volumio players from one player. To show this I have opened three browser windows, each one showing one of the three active Volumio players. Each one playing another playlist. By clicking switch device and select another player, you can control in this case the third player to be controlled by the first. This means that using the touch screen or my audio phonics rasp touch, I can control a headless Raspberry Pi elsewhere or using the Volumio app or my iPad to control all players from all other players. Using a Raspberry Pi is simple for those in the know but if you are not, you might need some perseverance, else don't even start. Or buy a ready to use solution from the stores that offer Raspberry Pi's. If you prefer, you can use an old PC or an ASUS Thinker board. Next to it you need a better sound card, DAC or digital audio to an external DAC, since the Raspberry Pi and the ASUS surely are not made for quality audio. The same goes for the old PC. But once set up properly Volumio works reliable. I have listened to it for quite some time and had it also playing in the background doing the production of this video. The subscription based options are very nice but it is up to you whether you value it 5 euros a month. If you don't, you still have a very nice music player and aggregator for free. And with this thought I leave you. I will be back next Friday at 5 pm central european time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to my channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. Help me reach even more people by giving this video a thumb up or link to this video on the social media. It is much appreciated. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and lets me improve the channel further. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on youtube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.