I have Caldera headless installed on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Hifiberry Digi2 Pro.
Every time power is reset to the device, whether from restarting, disconnecting power, or a power loss, Caldera does not automatically start on its own. When I open Plexamp and click on the cast icon, Caldera does not show up in the list. The simple act of connecting to the Raspberry Pi via SSH makes Caldera start showing up in the cast list in Plexamp again. I’m not running any commands, I’m simply connecting via SSH, I login, and then when the command line appears I check Plexamp and Caldera immediately shows up again in the cast list.
How can I have Caldera auto-start upon boot/power restore so that I don’t have to manually SSH into the Raspberry Pi every time?
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4B/4 GB w/Hifiberry Digi2 Pro
OS: Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit (Trixie v13 - 6/18/2026)
On an obviously related note, I just noticed that when I logoff from SSH anything that’s casting through Plexamp to Caldera immediately stops. Apparently I have to be logged in for Caldera to even run. So clearly it is not running as a service despite following the steps to start the service.
After doing so, music would continue to play after logging off the SSH session. Then I did a restart of the device and now I can’t get it to work at all from Plexamp. Initially Caldera showed in the list, but when I tried to connect I got a “Could not connect to player” error. After a couple more times trying it dropped off the list. I’ve force closed Plexamp and restarted multiple times and now Caldera simply does not show up in the list.
Rebooted the device via SSH multiple times with the same results. I then pulled the power and waited a minute before plugging in power. After power up, I force closed and re-opened Plexamp. I click on the cast icon and Caldera didn’t show. I click on the refresh button at the top right and it shows up immediately. I click on Caldera and the status icon spins forever until finally giving me a “Could not connect to player” after which Caldera drops off the list.
Completely lost now. Any other suggestions to try?
Once I got some more free time to investigate this I connected via SSH and enabled verbose logging to find it was having trouble communicating with the audio device. Apparently all my attempts to cast and repeated restarts caused it to somehow get locked up. I pulled the power cable and reconnected, and after it booted everything seemed to be working again. I’m back up and running.
I have a few suggestions:
Since I missed that linger command, I would suggest you add that information to the installation routine. If you view my screenshot above where I showed the output of the installation, you’ll notice that it walks you through all the steps needed but it does not include that Linger configuration step. You had to point me back to the download page on your website. You’d probably prevent many others from making the same mistake by doing so…the installation output is very helpful, except that missing requirement.
I burned quite a bit of time trying to figure out where support was provided for Caldera. There is zero information on the Caldera website and only after some time searching did I figure out that the Plex forums is where you’re providing support. Could be useful providing direct links to this area and perhaps create a separate forum section and/or tags for Caldera.
Might be a good time to add a support document to the Plex “Support Docs” section with basic installation and configuration details:
