Today marks something special for us and for everyone who loves what Volumio does. After nearly a year of work, we’re releasing Volumio 4 for Raspberry Pi and PC platforms.
You might fire it up and think, “Wait, it looks the same.” And you’d be right. We didn’t redesign the interface or move buttons around. What we did was rebuild the foundation.
Why This Matters
Think of Volumio 4 like replacing the engine in your favorite car. From the driver’s seat, everything feels familiar. But under the hood, we’ve swapped in something more powerful, more efficient, and ready to take you places the old engine simply couldn’t go.
We’ve moved to Debian Bookworm, which is the technical way of saying we’ve given Volumio a completely modern foundation. This isn’t just about what you’ll see today. It’s about what we can build tomorrow, and the year after that, and beyond.
A Huge Thanks to Our Community
This kind of work doesn’t happen alone. Andy, Marco, Pascal, Ash, Gé, Josh, and our entire inner circle of moderators and developers spent countless hours testing, troubleshooting, and pushing this forward. When you’re rebuilding something from the ground up while keeping it running, you need people who care as much about getting it right as we do. We couldn’t have done this without them.
The App Changes Everything
Here’s where things get exciting. Volumio 4 works hand in hand with our new Volumio app, which just landed on the app stores. This is the first step in our vision: one seamless ecosystem for music playback, everywhere, for every kind of digital music.
The new app doesn’t just look better. It’s fundamentally more resilient. We’ve built a new connection method that stays rock solid even when your network gets cranky. The onboarding is now straightforward instead of confusing. You’ll spend less time troubleshooting and more time listening.
What You’ll Actually Notice
Your CDs will play quietly now. Most USB drives used to make noise during playback. That’s fixed. Silent CD playback with the vast majority of drives out there.
Bluetooth that actually works well. We completely rewrote the Bluetooth stack. Lower latency, better compatibility, and we didn’t compromise on sound quality to get there. There’s also a new plugin that lets you send audio from Volumio to Bluetooth speakers, and your Bluetooth remotes will now work with Volumio.
Everything feels snappier. Browsing your library is smoother. Things respond faster. It’s one of those improvements that’s hard to quantify but impossible to miss once you experience it.
NVME storage support. So many of you asked for this. Read performance with NVME devices is dramatically better now.
Better handling of big libraries. We’re running the latest version of MPD, which means if you have thousands of albums, Volumio handles them more gracefully and reliably.
More DACs just work. We’ve expanded USB quirks support, so if your DAC supports direct DSD, Volumio will recognize it.
Security updates built in. We’re on the latest kernel, which means better security as the world around us keeps changing.
Touchscreen displays. If you want to connect an HDMI touchscreen panel, Volumio 4 has you covered with improved display management.
We Learned Our Lesson About Plugins
Let’s talk about something important. The Volumio 3 launch was a success in many ways, but we heard you loud and clear about one thing: plugins weren’t ready at launch like they were for Volumio 2. That hurt the experience for many of you, and we get it. Plugins aren’t just nice to have, they’re part of what makes Volumio yours.
We listened. We learned. And we made sure not to repeat that mistake.
All the plugins you love are available right now for Volumio 4. From day one. We didn’t want anyone sitting around waiting for their favorite functionality to come back.
But we didn’t stop there. We’ve also added new capabilities to Volumio 4 that open up possibilities for plugin developers. This means the plugins you already use can get better, and new plugins can do things that weren’t possible before.
How to Get It
Volumio 4 is available today for Raspberry Pi and PC platforms. If you have one of our Volumio products or something from our OEM partners, you can expect to see the update roll out in Q1 2026.
Two Things You Should Know
First, you can’t update over the air from Volumio 3 to Volumio 4. You’ll need to reflash. It’s not ideal, but with a change this fundamental, it was the only way to ensure everything works correctly.
Second, we had to make a difficult call. Raspberry Pi 1 and Raspberry Pi Zero are no longer supported. The necessary binaries simply aren’t available for these older boards. We know this affects some of you, and we didn’t make this decision lightly.
What Comes Next
Today is about giving Volumio a foundation that can support everything we want to build. The interface looks the same because we wished to this transition to feel seamless for you. But now, with Volumio 4 and the new app working together, we can start building the features and improvements that weren’t possible before.
We’ve spent a year on the foundation. Now comes the fun part.
Welcome to Volumio 4.
Download Volumio 4 and get the new app from your device’s app store. As always, if you run into any issues, our community is here to help.