2023-06-06, 22:18
Background: I have a SFF computer in the sitting room holding my music files on a 1TB SATA HDD. Half my music is conventional album-based mp3s that I happily tag with MusicBrainz. The other half is Classical music which I have tagged carefully to my own requirements.
Up until now I have installed Ubuntu on the HDD and set up two Kodi profiles, one for each type of music since having everything in a single library just isn't useable. Now whilst I'm happy to use a keyboard to switch Kodi profiles this is too much trouble for my partner and is even becoming a pain for me as I would prefer to just use Kore or Yatse for selecting music.
So I've come up with a solution that I'd like to outline here in the hope that
a) someone might be interested in a similar implementation, or
b) might be able to suggest a better alternative to me.
My Solution? In a nutshell I run Kodi from a 'live' Linux USB stick (or rather two!) on the SFF PC.
One Linux USB stick has Kodi installed and the music library is the classical MP3s while a second Linux USB stick has Kodi installed for the non-classical music.
The PC boots Linux from whichever USB stick is plugged in - the stick determines what music you see in Kodi. I make backup images of the USB sticks in case a USB stick should fail.
I specifically use Puppy Linux as, though quirky, it has really good built-in graphical tools for things like auto-mounting disk drives, running Kodi at startup and defining Samba network shares. Puppy's single 'root' user approach also means I am not plagued with Linux file privilege issues when copying music files around. Puppy is also intended to be useable on low-powered machines so is a good choice for my hardware. Usefully, Puppy Linux safely shuts the PC down when the power button is pressed.
My hardware:
Any old 4GB USB 2.0 sticks, although boot-up and library re-scans are rather faster using USB 3.0 sticks in the USB 3.0 port.
SFF PC is Gigabyte Brix, Celeron J1900, 4GB memory, internal SATA HDD
My software (on the USB sticks):
Puppy Linux 'bionicpup64-8.0'
Kodi 19.3
Comments?
redulike
Up until now I have installed Ubuntu on the HDD and set up two Kodi profiles, one for each type of music since having everything in a single library just isn't useable. Now whilst I'm happy to use a keyboard to switch Kodi profiles this is too much trouble for my partner and is even becoming a pain for me as I would prefer to just use Kore or Yatse for selecting music.
So I've come up with a solution that I'd like to outline here in the hope that
a) someone might be interested in a similar implementation, or
b) might be able to suggest a better alternative to me.
My Solution? In a nutshell I run Kodi from a 'live' Linux USB stick (or rather two!) on the SFF PC.
One Linux USB stick has Kodi installed and the music library is the classical MP3s while a second Linux USB stick has Kodi installed for the non-classical music.
The PC boots Linux from whichever USB stick is plugged in - the stick determines what music you see in Kodi. I make backup images of the USB sticks in case a USB stick should fail.
I specifically use Puppy Linux as, though quirky, it has really good built-in graphical tools for things like auto-mounting disk drives, running Kodi at startup and defining Samba network shares. Puppy's single 'root' user approach also means I am not plagued with Linux file privilege issues when copying music files around. Puppy is also intended to be useable on low-powered machines so is a good choice for my hardware. Usefully, Puppy Linux safely shuts the PC down when the power button is pressed.
My hardware:
Any old 4GB USB 2.0 sticks, although boot-up and library re-scans are rather faster using USB 3.0 sticks in the USB 3.0 port.
SFF PC is Gigabyte Brix, Celeron J1900, 4GB memory, internal SATA HDD
My software (on the USB sticks):
Puppy Linux 'bionicpup64-8.0'
Kodi 19.3
Comments?
redulike
