Mount USB Drive Under Volumio

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Volumio 2

Under Volumio 2 you can attach a USB flash drive or USB external hard drive and it should be detected automatically. You will need to:

  1. Connect the drive to the Pi (preferably with the Pi powered off). NOTE that external USB hard drives often draw more power than the Pi can supply through the USB port and so you may need to connect the drive to the Pi via a powered USB hub (even if the drive appears to work without a powered hub the Pi can experience voltage sags causing it to randomly crash).
  2. Go to http://volumio (or whatever you configured as the host name for the Pi) in your web browser.
  3. Go to “Settings” (the gear wheel in the top right corner of the screen) and select “My Music”, then click “Update” in the section marked “My Music”. You you should see a notification displayed on the screen indicating that it is scanning the drive and numbers should start to appear under the columns “Artists”, “Albums”, “Tracks” as Volumio finds your music files.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes the USB hard drive is not detected. One possible scenario is if the drive can put itself to sleep and is somehow asleep when the Pi boots up and is not ready when the Pi scans the USB bus. This could potentially lead to it not being detected as a USB device.

You can check if the drive is being detected by connecting to the Pi via SSH:

  1. Enable SSH in Volumio: In your web browser go to http://volumio/dev (or whatever you configured as the host name for the Pi) and click “ENABLE” in the SSH section – don’t worry the UI gives you NO visual indicator that you clicked it.
  2. Using an SSH client or in the terminal shell of your computer, type:
    ssh volumio@volumio
    or if you changed the host name will type:
    ssh volumio@whateveryoucalledyourdevice
  3. When it asks for the password type:
    volumio
  4. Display the list of USB devices by typing:
    lsusb
    You should see a list of devices, something like:

    Bus 001 Device 008: ID 1058:0748 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. My Passport 1TB USB 3.0 
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0e8d:1887 MediaTek Inc. Bus 001 Device 006: ID 148f:5372 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5372 Wireless Adapter 
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 2101:8501 ActionStar 
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 2101:8500 ActionStar 
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp. SMSC9512/9514 Fast Ethernet Adapter 
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9512 Standard Microsystems Corp. LAN9500 Ethernet 10/100 Adapter / SMSC9512/9514 Hub 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

    In this case the entry “Bus 001 Device 008” is the USB hard drive.

Volumio 1.x

If you want to attach the external USB drive containing the music library directly to the Raspberry Pi being used as a music player do the following the steps:

  1. Connect the drive to a powered hub that is connected to the Pi (preferably with the Pi powered off).
  2. Go to http://volumio (or whatever you configured as the host name for the Pi).
  3. Select ‘Main’ from the menu and click ‘Browse” in the navigation bar at the bottom of the page.
  4. The list of sources should appear – select ‘USB’ and the drive should appear along with any other USB music sources that are connected.

Troubleshooting

If the drive does not show up perhaps it is because it is formatted using exfat which is not supported under Volumio. You will need to install fuse-exfat.

  1. In a terminal connect to the Pi using ssh:
    ssh root@volumio
    (or whatever hostname you used when you set up the device). Password is ‘volumio’.
  2. Update the package database:
    sudo apt-get update
  3. And fuse-exfat to support the exfat file system:
    sudo apt-get install fuse-exfat
  4. Then reboot the Pi:
    reboot