Or is there any specific reason why Volumio-developers treat Bluetooth like rotten fish?
I know i’m a beginner in this forum and maybe beginners are not entiteled to say what i am about to say, but…
C’mon guys, honestly,
since literally everybody out there is asking for bluetooth support in Volumio, as a bluetooth A2DP receiver, i would suggest the Volumio-team stops working on whatever they are doing right now and start working on a Bluetooth-plugin.
Why?
At 1st, because i am a Volumio lover!
No matter who i am talking to, Moode users, Rune users, Max2play users, the very first thing they’ll ask me is if Volumio has bluetooth support. They ask it because they know the answer. And it really piss me off to answer No, not yet again and again. I can’t hear it anymore.
At 2nd, because there are some 20+ projects at Git seeking to achieve just that:
There are many, admittedly hard to set up, but more or less working, solutions to add Bluetooth support to Volumio. Even on a Zero W by disabling wifi during bluetooth streams. Many scripts do work well, until you change anything in the Volumio web-interface and thus overwrite the configs in place. Why are so many people doing this shit at Git? Because they are tired of waiting until Volumio will finally look into Bluetooth.
At 3rd, because it’s easy to do!
With so many, basically working 3rd-party solutions from script kiddies and hobbyists out there, it should be ridiculously easy for the Volumio-team, who personnally know every byte of the Volumio-image, to turn anything already working into a nice plugin once and for good.
For the Volumio guys who know exactly what they are doing this should be a half week approach! And don’t tell me otherwise.
So, when can we finally expect Buetooth support being officially integrated into Volumio?
And please, don’t turn this into a MyVolumio feature!
I know we all need to feed our families. But that’s why we have our real life jobs, right?
Hi Germain,
the reasons for Volumio not having bluetooth (as of now) are:
Very low request. It might seem strange to you, but we received really low request for it. I believe because most of our users preferhi quality playback over bluetooth.
It’s very very hard to get right (the way we consider right). We are working on it (not joking) since years. And we never found a way to deliver reliable, good sounding results. What you install with the scripts you find online are really good starting point, but were not acceptable for us.
We had 4 different developers working on it over the years, and it took a huge amount of work to get done the way we want to.
We face the added difficulty to make it work reliable on all PI generations, ARMV7 boards (Tinkerboard and the latter) and X86.
Now, we finally made it and we are almost ready to release (except for the fact that it works on all PIs but not on PI4… dammit… and of course we can’t release it until it works 100% great on all devices).
But we made it in a way which I believe is unmatched:
It supports metadata, so you will see now playing info when streaming via bluetooth
It supports convenience switching, so if you’re playing webradio and you pair your phone it will automatically switch to bluetooth and viceversa
It has adaptive resampling algorithms, so we are able to exploit the best quality (of AD2P) with different hardware.
Last, yes, it will be a MyVolumio feature. Why? Because so much has been invested into it. You might not know, but running this project costs quite a lot of money (servers, developers, services, rent, etc…) and donations are few hundreds euros per year (they cover less than 1% of our budget). So, the only way we can develop new features which require lot of work is to know that they will be repaid (so we can invest more in new features, many of which go also in the free version).
Hope that this explanation will give you a little bit of context, and hope that you will understand that supporting Volumio via MyVolumio is important and useful for all.
Many thanks Michelangelo,
i am very curious about this BT feature.
I did not request it, because i saw that others did.
I really appreciate the work of the volumio team. step by step it’s getting further
Hi Volumio,
thanks for your detailed answers about what was going on behind the scenes.
I’m happy that you finally added Bluetooth support. At least for subscribers.
However, i wholeheartedly support and appreciate FOSS since many years even i’m in the coding business. I support free n open software because i believe it is the right thing to promote.
Anyway, having Bluetooth support as a MyVolumio service kills Volumio for me alltogether.
Not because i’m too greedy to spend a few bucks. But because i don’t want to be bound and have to rely on some servers in the internet to use my audio equipment at home.
I generally refuse from subscription services. I’d rather invest in Bluray’s than in Netflix for example.
Thanks again for your feedback…
Germain
Germain, I understand your concern.
Volumio is a FOSS product, with a great community and plenty of documentation and lots of tutorials on the net. Some of them explain how to integrate bluetooth via cmdline and some fiddling.
IMHO the great thing about FOSS is freedom: if you don’t like supporting this project with a small amount, you’re free to enable the BT function yourself by following some of the guides available.
On the other hand, being an Open Source promoter (IMHO)you shall have to consider that software development costs, and more than that, it costs to keep a project alive (volumio costs several thousands of euros in server costs alone…). IMHO being a supporter of FOSS sometimes also means recognizing the hard work that companies like Volumio do (while giving most of their work away for free) and support them financially.
Generally, i get your point and in no way i want to demean your hard work on Volumio as a distro.
But at the moment you call Volumio a company it’s not a project anymore but a business.
I make a living as a professional coder and at the same time i volunteer at several community
projects. That’s because my job is my most fascinating hobby. It gives me satisfaction as well as broad insights into many fields of technology not covered by my primary job.
If ever i should start monetizing the things that i created for my personal pleasure, it would mean giving up on my beloved hobby and turning it into just another job.
Anyway, as you said already. Free and open software is foremost about freedom.
Thus anybody is free to interpret it the way it feels right for them.
So even it is not as free as it could be, i wish Volumio a bright success because it’s by far the most appealing solution where you can feel the love of it’s creators in every detail.
