Pirate Radio questions 2022

Support
1

Hi,
I’ve got my newly purchased assembled, but only sort of working.

I’m trying to play MP3s locally stored in ~/Music.
My goal is never to have to use the web interface. I want the device to be standalone.
I don’t need any internet radio.

Here are the issues:
#1
The buttons on the hat don’t work most of the time.
Button A does start and stop the play, but when paused the screen shows a Pause symbol, and while playing the screen shows a Play symbol. This seems reversed and counter intuitive.
Buttons B & Y changed the volume on one boot up (one session) but haven’t done anything since.
Button X has never caused a Next to occur.
**** Is there a hack to get the code to display the button presses to the console?
**** Can someone give me the path to the relevant code where button presses are processed, so I can hack this in myself? (Please tell me it’s in the Python, as modding some C code and recompliling is a bit too big a lift.)

#2
I loaded one album of MP3s for initial testing and they show up and play.
I loaded more and they aren’t showing up, even after a reboot.
I used both sudo mopidyctl local scan and the Start Local Scan in the web UI to get the tracks ingested.
***** Any workarounds?
***** Can someone provide the local path to a file showing what local files the player believes it has scanned?

#3
I really REALLY want and this to be a standalone player.
The initial message on the hat’s LCD to open IP:6680 in my browser to play music is a complete deal breaker for me.
**** Is there a way to get the device to open to the first track, or to the last track played? I’m OK with having to Next my way through the tracks.
**** Alternately, can anyone point me toward (Python) code for an alternate player, that is less feature rich but able to play local files as a standalone device?
I can source my own album art for the screen, so I don’t need the device to go find that for me.

Please let me know the relevant software / OS versions and or config files you’d like me to post.

Thanks!!!
John

2

Ahoy John!

Sandy’s pointed me in the direction of this post, sorry that you didn’t get any replies - it’s been a busy couple of weeks for us following the Pico W launch! For future reference, if you need to contact our support team directly you can do that using the contact form on the website - messages sent this way go into our ticket system so they’re more likely to get a fast reply and less likely to get missed!

Sounds like Mopidy isn’t quite what you’re after for your standalone player - it really does assume that you’ll be using the web interface to start playback, at least in the first instance. There’s a bunch of other audio players for Raspberry Pi though - here’s a few that might be worth looking at:

  • If you want something fully featured and ready to go, Volumio is a popular online and offline audio player OS with tons of customisation options - and there’s a plugin to get everything working with Pirate Audio.

  • If you’d rather use something minimal and Python based that’s easy to modify then our @gadgetoid whipped up a tiny offline MP3 player that might serve as a starting point for writing your own.

Hope this helps, let us know how you get on!