Last night I found time to finally install the first release candidate of Volumio 2, my preferred audio player software. This is more exciting than it sounds, because when I read the blogpost last summer that Volumio is going to be completely rewritten, with replacing the base technologies, I was a bit afraid that this will be one of the last bits that we heard from this project. Too many cool projects died after famous last announcements like that.
But not Volumio.
After quite some development time the project released RC1. While there were a few small bugs in a beta, my feelings about the RC1 are really positive. Volumio2 has a very nice and stylish GUI, a great improvement over Volumio1. Album-art is now nicely integrated in the playback pane and and everything is more shiny, even if the general concept is the same as in Volumio1.
I like it because it is only a music player. Very reduced on that, but also very thought through and focussed to fulfill that job perfectly. I just want to find and play music from my collection, quickly and comfortable and with good sound quality. No movies, series, images. Just sound.
About speed: While the scanning of my not too big music collection on a NAS was a bit of a time consuming task in the past, this feels now much faster (maybe thats only because of a faster network between the Raspberry and the NAS?). Searching, browsing and everything works quite fluid on an Raspberry2. And with the Hifiberry DAC for output, the sound quality is more than ok.
This is an release candidate of the first release of the rewritten project, and the quality is already very good. Nevertheless I found a few things that did not work for me or could be improved. That the volume control is not working is probably because of the Hifiberry DAC driver, I remember there was something, but haven’t investigated yet.
There are some things in the GUI that could be looked at again: For example on the Browse page, there is the very well working search field. After entering the search term and Enter, the search result is displayed as a list of songs to select from. I wished that the songs were additionally grouped by albums, which should also be selectable to be pushed to the play queue.
Also it would be great if the Queue would somehow indicate which entry is currently played. I could not spot that.
But these are only minor findings which can easily be addressed later after enhancement requests were posted :-)
I think Volumio2 is already a great success, even before it was released! You should not hesitate to try it if you love to listen to music!
Thanks for the hard work Volumio-Team!