volumio on raspberry pi 2 with album art

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I have received a hifiberry daughterboard for the great raspberry pi 2 which makes it put out really nice audio. Now MPD is not featuring local cover art unless you run a webserver to tell it where to look for it.

Now here is how to tell the built in webserver to add a subdirectory that finds cover art (if you follow convention to sort your albums.

This information was compiled by Rowar from the RaspiFy forums before it was called volumio
but it works fine here with mpdroid and mPod

thank you, Dude! :)

background info:

RaspyFi use MPD to play music. MPD is configured to list all music from /var/lib/mpd/music. So it doesn’t matter if you have a NAS or a USB drive connected. Both sources will be symlinked to this folder automatically, if you use the Webinterface of RaspyFi.
The path /var/www/ is the standard webserver path of Linux. I just added an subfolder, so i doesn’t mess up the built in Web-Interface structure. You can also name the new webserver path “covers” (/var/www/covers). The built in webserver nginx will delivers the covers, if you query them correctly.

Some background infos: Mpod knows from MPD which file is actually played. It retrieves from MPD the indirect path and query the webserver with the same path for the cover Art e.g.

By MPD played song: /var/lib/mpd/music/NAS/Library/Artist/Album/Song.flac
Mpod knows only the indirect path: NAS/Library/Artist/Album/
For the Cover Art Mpod just add the configured URL and the filename of the Cover Art: http://[Your RaspyFi IP]/Music/NAS/Library/Artist/Album/folder.jpg

We just symlinked the whole MPD music path. So the webserver of RaspyFi delivers correctly the covers. There is no overhead, because no webserver script is running. Mpod is quering the covers only one time and stores them in the local cache together to the Artist, Album and Song informations. That makes Mpod so blazing fast for scroling and filtering.

Sorry for my bad english. If something is not understandable feel free to ask again, i try to rephrase/explain it again.

Now how to do it:

create a symlink from the mpd music directory to the webserver directory, creating a subdirectory “Music” and point mpod at it – I use the filename “cover.jpg” but YMMV

On RaspyFi Volumio:
1. SSH to RaspyFi Volumio.local (or IP or whatever you called it)
2. (sudo) ln -s /var/lib/mpd/music /var/www/Music
3. restart webserver or volumio

On Mpod:
1. Configured players -> [Your Player] -> Advanced:
2. Local Cover Art -> URL: http://[Your Volumio IP]/Music (example: http://192.168.178.11/Music)
3. Local Cover Art -> Cover Filename: [Your picture name] (example: folder.jpg)
4. Save -> Done. Restart Mpod completely

The Cover Filename is case sensitive. However you need your library sorted by albums and in each album directory one picture for the Album Art.

I encounter some blank Album Arts in the “Artist” and the “Album” section. In “Now Playing” and “Song” all covers are displayed correctly. I think it’s becaues a problem with “Varios Artists” and some strange album titles.

also interesting:
https://volumio.org/forum/streaming-from-ubuntu-and-other-linux-volumio-t2914.html
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/cygn/pulseaudio-dlna/
I really want to be able to stream from my laptop :]