

Volumio's system, however it works, didn't play as well with my library. Other programs, like JRiver and Roon, are okay with this: They use flexible, sophisticated metadata tagging. I have set up most of the directories and files in my library by date added and not by artist, work, etc. Volumio seems to rely on the library's file structure for organization, but it provides no library-management tools, and the documentation says nothing about how it expects a library to be configured. I'm guessing this is a hardware limitation of the Primo's CPU and RAM. When I selected a subset of my libraryabout 40k tracks of primarily stereo PCM musicthe Primo's performance was smooth. Volumio told me that the Primo performs best with libraries up to about 40,000 tracks, and my library is much larger. But when I selected my main library, which includes all my hi-rez, DSD, and multichannel files, it was slow to load, and when it did, performance was slow and unreliable and many albums were missing. Via the setup menu, the Primo saw all the music sources available on my LAN. I tried all three options: streaming services Qobuz and Tidal, local storage, and network storage.

Storage options include directly connected storage such as USB thumb drives and hard discs and network sources via wired or wireless LAN. The most obvious application for the Primo is as a network music streamer that allows you to choose and play music from your own files or from an internet music source, including streaming apps like Qobuz and Tidal.

A few options require you to restart Volumio before they can take effect. Almost all the options have buttons to open pop-up help. The settings menu includes Sources (music libraries, local or networked), Playback Options (choose your output device and configure formats, the volume control, and so on), Appearance (screen color, backgrounds, etc.), Network (addresses, DNS, and so on), System (startup settings, system updates, etc.), Plugins (both those installed and the ones available), Alarm (to use Primo as an alarm clock), Sleep (to set the sleep timer), Shutdown (to power off or restart), and Help (which takes you to Volumio's online documentation).
