Andrew, A Direct Answer Please.

[Mr. Bill]

Andrew, Hi. As a long time Vortexbox user (and donor) I have enjoyed using your software which was way ahead of its time for many years. However like many of us are disappointed that the Vortexbox project is suffering a slow painful death. The base OS (Fedora 25) is now 10 generations behind and soon to be 11 generations behind, the internal CD ripper no longer supplies meda data and so on. Like some users I have moved to a Raspberry Pi4B running the free PiCorePlayer software which is still actively maintained and while it does work OK it does not offer the same lever of convenience that your Vortexbox software did. Missing are a built-in backup function and a CD ripper function. While both of these can be fixed with external software it does not come close to what Vortexbox offered out of the box.

So a direct question, when can we expect a major Vortexbox OS update? Or, is Vortexbox 2.5 the end of the line? Please no vague answers such as we will continue to update Vortexbox with no details or timeline. If this is the end of the Vortexbox project I (and others) would like to know so we can move on.

Thanks, Mr. Bill

[lawrence2357]

Just an FYI, I got my metadata working again with advice elsewhere in this forum. When I upgraded the software it didn't need tweaking again to work so I think the latest software is able to get the metadata (except for album art).

[bburroughs]

I too would very much like to hear an update of some kind. I like my vortextbox, but it's pretty frustrating being so far behind all the latest versions of software with no apparent path forward.

[SeanMiddleton]

I too would very much like to hear an update of some kind. I like my vortextbox, but it's pretty frustrating being so far behind all the latest versions of software with no apparent path forward.

I've drawn my own conclusion form Andrews continued silence and that is that there isn't really an intention to properly support/advance VB going forwards. Its the end of the line for VB. So, I set about looking at alternatives. I've used Picoreplayer as my player for yonks and I tried an LMS build under Picore but its not good for very large collections like mine. Its a brilliant Player for LMS though and my player of choice. Next I tried Daphile and that's OK but has some issues with indexing very large collections and in any event seems to run a little slow. Daphile is easy to install and has some ongoing support , though there doesn't really seem much of a user base/forum etc to call upon. So, I decided that Daphile was not my choice. Maybe for modest music collections and ease of install just to use it as an LMS server and CD ripper Daphile is a good choice...... I next focused on openmediavault (OMV) and I built up a few OMV 5 and OMV 6 (still beta) boxes. OMV has absolutely excellent support forums including very many Youtube vids and oodles of text based forum/Wiki support. Installing OMV is not that difficult if you follow the Youtube instructions. Installing LMS was easy and installing Bliss, Subsonic and Transmission was easy too. OMV is Deb based and will support massive disk sizes (VB is limited to 16TB under Fedora 25) . I installed LMS (8.2.1) at the command line and Transmission/Bliss/Subsonic I installed under the Docker/Portainer package, which is a feature of OMV. To set up OMV from scratch with all this stuff takes about 90 minutes. The Docker/Portainer feature of OMV is amazing. Basically you can easily install hundreds of packages very easily. It also has a really easy to use apt-get tool for easy apt installs. There is also a Plugin miniDNLA server. I haven't yet found a CD ripper to install but I always used EAC separately under Windows for that. I found the VB ripper (when it worked long back) often couldn't identify my CD's, so I never used it. EAC is brilliant. So, in summary, my VB days are over I'm an OMV man now. Its my NAS, LMS server, DLNA server and lots of other stuff !!

[Fifer]

So, in summary, my VB days are over I'm an OMV man now. Its my NAS, LMS server, DLNA server and lots of other stuff !!

Sounds so close to ideal apart from the lack of a ripper. I've looked at all the options you've considered and discounted them for the same reasons. I use picoreplayer and Max2Play as players (both are very good) but again, lack a ripper. I suppose I could buy a cheap USB CD drive (the only CD drive in our house is the 5.25 inch one in my HP Proliant Microserver based vortexbox) - but I'd really like a single box solution if it was available. Seems it's not though.

[SeanMiddleton]

Sounds so close to ideal apart from the lack of a ripper. I've looked at all the options you've considered and discounted them for the same reasons. I use picoreplayer and Max2Play as players (both are very good) but again, lack a ripper. I suppose I could buy a cheap USB CD drive (the only CD drive in our house is the 5.25 inch one in my HP Proliant Microserver based vortexbox) - but I'd really like a single box solution if it was available. Seems it's not though.

Some research needed I guess on options for installing a ripper under OMV. I found a few links that may offer some clues:

https://b3n.org/automatic-ripping-machine/

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-rip-c...x-command-line
https://somewideopenspace.wordpress....yahcdramorpig/

and here's a useful article https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-rip-a...ing-cdparanoia After reading this article I was able to get cdparanoia up and running in 2 minutes. I used the Apt-Tool plugin in OMV to install cdparanoia. I used a USB CD drive and cdparanoia found and installed it easily. Ripping seems fine (to WAV but you can pipe into flac as explained in the article). I need to experiment a bit more but it seems to me that cdparanoia is the best choice around. Just needs a web based front end adding if you don't want to do command line stuff. The bit that is missing is tagging (!)

In searching for a tagging front end for the cdparanoia ripper I found 'grip' . This looks like a promising ripper/tagger. I need to understand how to install and use headless, so I'm reading up....................https://sourceforge.net/p/grip/wiki/...q=installation

[Fifer]

Some research needed I guess on options for installing a ripper under OMV. I found a few links that may offer some clues:

https://b3n.org/automatic-ripping-machine/

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-rip-c...x-command-line
https://somewideopenspace.wordpress....yahcdramorpig/

and here's a useful article https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-rip-a...ing-cdparanoia After reading this article I was able to get cdparanoia up and running in 2 minutes. I used the Apt-Tool plugin in OMV to install cdparanoia. I used a USB CD drive and cdparanoia found and installed it easily. Ripping seems fine (to WAV but you can pipe into flac as explained in the article). I need to experiment a bit more but it seems to me that cdparanoia is the best choice around. Just needs a web based front end adding if you don't want to do command line stuff. The bit that is missing is tagging (!)

In searching for a tagging front end for the cdparanoia ripper I found 'grip' . This looks like a promising ripper/tagger. I need to understand how to install and use headless, so I'm reading up....................https://sourceforge.net/p/grip/wiki/...q=installation

Great progress! I have some reading to do ...

[SeanMiddleton]

Great progress! I have some reading to do ...

I've read up a bit more now and I think grip may not be the best choice. It was designed to run under Gnome and whilst I believe it can be command line driven it isn't obvious how to install grip in that way. My current thinking is to use 'abcde'. This is functionally the same as grip but is designed to run headless. I used the Apt-Tool in OMV (Plugin) and abcde installed straightaway, took 30 seconds. In the commng days I'll have a play. Certainly the command line options in abcde are extremely comprehensive ! See https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/ for info on abcde

[SeanMiddleton]

Wow. A Docker based replacement for Vortexbox.

https://github.com/48clyde/VBR

I installed this on my OMV machine and it installed perfectly. LMS ran straightaway and the ripper detected my music CD straight away, ripped it, tagged it no problem. So, this looks like a functioning VB running in a Docker Container within the OMV environment. Brilliant !! For anyone looking to experiment I advice following the Youtube installation videos for OMV. Actually the video covers OMV5 installation but its pretty easy to understand OMV 6 install once you've watch the OMV5 video. OMV6 is supposedly in mature Alpha but it looks rock solid to me. I've installed both OMV5 and OMV6 on different motherboards and both work fine.

After installing and configuring OMV as per the video, then install VBR as instructed by the link above. After that you have a modern VB in all but name. OMV does a lot more stuff besides, as you will find out when you do a bit of reading. The only bit I haven't yet figured out is editing the 'docker-compose.yml ' file described in the above link.

Here's the Utube video for OMV5 installation (as I said though I would recommend OMV6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_oxzpvMPTE&t=1331s

[SeanMiddleton]

Re my post #9 above on installing VBR:

I’m now tackling the default configuration file ( docker-compose.yml )for VBR. Explanations are given in the above link (https://github.com/48clyde/VBR ). Basically VBR creates this default configuration file with the following entries, giving the default location it places the music etc files into on the operating system disk drive (/dev/sda in my case) :

- /home/${USER}/Music:/mnt/music:ro
- /home/${USER}/Music/playlists:/mnt/playlists
- /home/${USER}/Music/state:/mnt/state

The end user is supposed to edit these locations in docker-compose.yml in order to point to the corresponding locations in his particular setup.

On my OMV setup I use a separate HDD (/dev/sdb1/) for all my music, playlist (etc etc) files. I just use a small SDD as /dev/sda/ to hold the OMV operating system only. I only use flac for my music files and all these flac files reside on the HDD (/dev/sdb1/). These are located in :

/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-6230c7b4-e6ff-4f1f-80e1-46e807126f27/music/flac
/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-6230c7b4-e6ff-4f1f-80e1-46e807126f27/music/playlist

I don’t have any folder called ‘ state’, which is referred to in the default locations in docker-compose.yml . I can easily create that folder on my /srv/dev-disk……………………… if it necessary

What I need to understand is what the edit would look like such that it points to my locations. I tried the following but this just generated an error

/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-6230c7b4-e6ff-4f1f-80e1-46e807126f27/music/flac:/mnt/music:ro
/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-6230c7b4-e6ff-4f1f-80e1-46e807126f27/music/playlist:/mnt/playlists

The error was “ERROR: The Compose file './VBR/docker-compose.yml' is invalid because:
services.flac_mirror.volumes contains an invalid type, it should be an array
services.lms.volumes contains an invalid type, it should be an array”

Anybody got any idea how I should do this edit ??

Just FYI I paste below a df of my disks:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev 7986380 0 7986380 0% /dev
tmpfs 1603172 2496 1600676 1% /run
/dev/sda2 113293540 6754596 100737780 7% /
tmpfs 8015856 0 8015856 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 8015856 0 8015856 0% /tmp
/dev/sda1 523244 148 523096 1% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb1 13563583456 9929384552 2950563500 78% /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-6230c7b4-e6ff-4f1f-80e1-46e807126f27
overlay 113293540 6754596 100737780 7% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/0dce32c89ceda32b34befb022443db419609d42fece8962982 05f275962f1e12/merged
overlay 113293540 6754596 100737780 7% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/249a84486dfac4e1676cc1278a0b12046631ef6e27e725489d 5394565b2af622/merged
overlay 113293540 6754596 100737780 7% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/ea47523f6c96db2df22c5aa530229378c5f02a3fd137729a93 9a7797c89c593c/merged
overlay 113293540 6754596 100737780 7% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/bf6a77e2842c715328527b6689034a61a541f4a770cddc3eb4 547e51e3b331b8/merged
[email protected]:~#

[Fifer]

Anybody got any idea how I should do this edit ??

Not sure if this helps? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...docker-compose

[Fifer]

Wow. A Docker based replacement for Vortexbox.

This looks amazing!

[SeanMiddleton]

Not sure if this helps? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...docker-compose

Thanks Fifer, it was an interesting link to learn a bit more about Docker but I haven't yet solved my problem in post #10. Its worth noting that the OMV GUI streamlines and simplifies the installation of Docker containers as you will see if u decide to knock up an OMV server. Basically OMV (in the 'omv-extras plugins) provides a nice GUI front end for Docker and also Portainer. Portainer is basically a very easy GUI for setting up Docker containers. Makes life very easy in terms of ports etc etc and as such avoids all the syntax errors eluded to in your link.

Unfortunately though the VBR Docker container was written originally for Ubuntu (still works fine on OMV) and so therefore doesn't come up in the list of containers which you can search for in Portainer. This is why you have to install VBR manually at the command line, as per the instructions in https://github.com/48clyde/VBR Would be great if the VBR container just popped up in the Portaner list then all you would need to do is enter the port numbers and location of your music files in the Portainer GUI and click install

Hopefully some more Vortex users will read this thread and start to play with OMV and the VBR container. As I see it that's really the Vortexbox of 2022

[Fifer]

Hopefully some more Vortex users will read this thread and start to play with OMV and the VBR container. As I see it that's really the Vortexbox of 2022

I definitely intend to when I have time. Although I notice that VBR itself hasn't been updated since August 2020. Is that a concern, or is it irrelevant? Possibly the latter if VBR can pull in the latest version of LMS and I presume VB running on an outdated version of Linux is taken care of by the OMV environment. So many questions though - does Bliss run in VBR? Does this mean that we can build a Pi based VB server?

[SeanMiddleton]

I definitely intend to when I have time. Although I notice that VBR itself hasn't been updated since August 2020. Is that a concern, or is it irrelevant? Possibly the latter if VBR can pull in the latest version of LMS and I presume VB running on an outdated version of Linux is taken care of by the OMV environment. So many questions though - does Bliss run in VBR? Does this mean that we can build a Pi based VB server?

Hi Fifer
Hopefully you will find some time to have a play. In the meantime, in answer to some of the questions your raised: OMV is extremely well supported and updated very regularly, so that really take care of the Debian platform being fully updated. VBR is really a package of abcde (tagger) + cdparanoia (ripper) + LMS. So keeping VBR up to date is really just about keeping these packages up to date. That is easily done at the command line. As for Bliss/Transmission/Subsonic these can be easily installed at the command line or in some cases there may be Portainer containers already available for them. Portainer has many other containers you may wish install alongside. There are a number of Transmission and Subsonic alternatives for example. The beauty of installing these under Portainer is that you can just turn them on and off as you wish with a simple click of their radio buttons.