Troubleshooting

Note

The first boot may take a few minutes while the filesystem is expanded and configured for the first time, especially on Models A, B, B+ and Zero. If you have enabled media scanning and have a lot of music files, this will take even longer. Please be patient.

If you experience problems with Pi Musicbox your first port of call should be the discussion forum. Please search before creating a new topic as your question may have already been answered. Otherwise feel free to ask any questions, suggest features or report bugs.

When you’re debugging yourself or asking for help, you should check the following things first:

SD card

Not all SD cards are created equal and even expensive branded cards are sometimes faulty. Try rewriting the image to a different memory card, preferably one you know definitely works. Always buy your SD cards from a trusted seller - beware of fakes! Card speed is not usually an issue and is only really noticeable when writing the image. The minimum card size is 1GB but a larger card is preferable as it leaves you with more free space. When powering off or restarting Pi Musicbox please make sure you shutdown the system first to avoid SD card corruption.

Power supply

Some cheap unbranded 5V power supplies have been reported to cause problems, especially with the RPi Model 3B and/or power-hungry USB devices. If you’re also connecting a USB harddisk ensure it has sufficient power; desktop drives must be connected via a powered hub or have their own dedicated power brick. Refer to the Raspberry Pi website for further guidance.

Wireless dongle

If you are having wireless network problems then connecting an ethernet cable will allow you to get up and running and make further debug easier. When using USB wifi devices, the problem is often with the dongle itself so try a different one.

Startup errors

Most errors occuring during startup will print an accompanying error message to help you identify the underlying problem. Attaching a computer monitor or TV screen via HDMI will allow you to view these error messages. This is particularly useful when network problems are preventing you from gaining remote access to the system via SSH (see below).

Enable SSH remote access

Being able to connect to the system from another computer will make debugging much easier. To enable SSH in Pi Musicbox, set enable_ssh = true in settings.ini or use the settings webpage. Help on how to connect from your Windows computer is available here. You must have a working network connection to do this but if you don’t, you can still login locally by attachng a USB keyboard. In either case, the username is root and the default password is musicbox.

Log files

Once logged in, you can view the various log filesfor more hints. The startup log can be found at /var/log/musicbox_startup.log and the Mopidy log can be found at /var/log/mopidy/mopidy.log. If you enable Mopidy’s more detailed debug logging (via the settings webpage) you’ll find that log file at /tmp/mopidy-debug.log. Note that this debug log will be lost when Pi Musicbox is powered off or restarted. When posting in the forum please try to provide all relevant log files.

Config file

If there is a typo, error or corruption in your settings.ini config file then usually the system will still boot but the Mopidy music server will not start. When this occurs you may find you’ll be able to connect via SSH, use Airplay, Spotify Connect etc. but you’ll be unable to access the settings webpage, the webclients, or use your MPD client. If this happens, login and check /var/log/mopidy/mopidy.log for config errors. To display the current active config run service mopidy run config; this output has all sensitive information such as passwords removed so it is suitable for sharing on the forum.