Pi Musicbox – First steps


After downloading Pi Musicbox from the website, follow one of the tutorials for writing the image to an SD card. If you want to change settings before first booting up, you can do so under Windows by editing settings.ini in the config folder. If you plan on running headless (i.e. without screen/keyboard connected), you should at least set the Wi-Fi settings (if you want to use Wi-Fi) and enable ssh. After inserting the SD card and plugging it in, the Raspberry Pi should start up. There are a few error messages which can be ignored, or taken care of by commenting out the offending lines in settings.ini.

These are a couple of things that are good to know:

  • The web interface should be reachable at http://musicbox.local.This might require the installation of Apple Bonjour. The Raspberry Pi also displays its IP address after booting, which can be used as well.
  • Under Windows, you can use PuTTY as ssh client.
  • You can log into the system with user root and password musicbox. Careful, this is a root account, so you can easily break things.
  • nano is installed as text editor. All commands are invoked via Ctrl, so Ctrl+o is write, Ctrl+x exit, and so on.
  • The settings file is located in /boot/config/settings.ini.
  • Playlists need to be placed in /var/lib/mopidy/playlists, with absolute paths.
  • USB devices are mounted at /music/USB, /music/USB2, and so on.
  • The web interface is located in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mopidy_musicbox_webclient/static/, should you want to make changes e.g. to the color scheme.
  • To prevent corrupting the SD card, I advise to always shut down the Raspberry Pi (can be done from the web interface) before unplugging it.
  • There’s an active forum, where many questions you might have, have probably already been asked and answered. There’s also an (outdated) manual and an FAQ on the website.

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