Building a Raspberry Pi-based streamer - a guide for the nervous

If it was Mac, likely was HFS (Mac OS Xtended) or HFS+ (Mac OS Xtended Journaled), which I don't think work with the Pi or Linux. However, your Mac does allow for formatting large drives into FAT32.

I would stick to the iFi iPower. That supply is variable and more for testing purposes. I don't think it would be much improvement over iPower.

Differences are subtle, but it has been awhile. And I have not tried with my Digi+ Pro or turning off WiFi or with better power supply. All of them tweak MPD slightly and use different settings and all sound slightly different from the player. If just using it as an Airplay receiver, you may not notice a difference, so YMMV.

Just reminds me I need more micro-SD cards so I can test out different distros. I will admit I have not even tried the picoreplayer.

 

Bollocks. Bit-perfect playback doesn't "sound slightly different". If it does, your player is broken, or more likely, you're suffering confirmation bias.

 

I've been looking into possibilities with Rpi for parametric EQ's. Apparently nobody's done it and it's really hard to pull off (for some reason). Does someone have any experience?

 

Have you seen those miniDSP boxes that @Hrodulf likes? (Mentioning him might get him to chime in with more useful info..)

 

Jitter is still bit perfect.

We already know there is tons of noise on these things. How the ARM processes sound and the MPD works varies on build.

Now this was using a USB interface, so that might have something to do with it. Like I said, I have not tested with my new setup. If you don't believe me, try yourself.

 

I have a minidsp 4x10, and it's great. That's what got me thinking about using pi for something useful like that in the first place. Its processor should be stronger than minidsp's, but apparently it's not "optimized" or something...
Also, thanks

 

The good RPI3 HATs and similar boxes have astonishingly low amounts of jitter, considering the price.

Probably comes from only having to deal with i2s as an input, instead of decoding network or usb packets.

In my limited experience, jitter amounts that small you can hear in the treble, if you can hear them at all, so if you're hearing them anywhere else it's probably bias.

Still, that's better than one review I read where the writer swore up and down that roon core on one machine sounded better than another.

 

Well, doing DSP on a general-purpose CPU can be surprisingly inefficient compared to "proper" hardware, no..?

 

That would be logical. However, a modern CPU is just insanely more powerful. It's only a matter of power efficiency, hell, voicemeeter can do 42 parametric EQ's at the same time and CPU barely feels it (I think it even doesn't show up on any readings).

It's just, no support on pi. Also, I'm not 100% sure about the info I gave, there's not much on the internet to find about it (and I have a i7 4770, might be different on something weaker, dunno)

 

It can be done, but I haven't found a way to do it reliably and with low enough latency. Brutefir seems to be the software of choice for this, but latency can get brutal.

For my system I'll most likely be using an Intel NUC or an old MacMini hooked to the ADI-2 Pro with Reaper running the necessary plug-ins.

 

That's some brutal piece of equipment

I just have a rpi lying around doing nothing so I hoped to use it for dsp correction for a secondary system or something

 

Differences are all in the treble. Volumio and Rune sounded darker to me - less treble. Reminded me of my old Digidesign 001 with terrible jitter. This was playing the same files from the same source on the same everything else.

 

moOde 4.0 has a graphic and a parametric EQ. Although the GUI is pretty crude, but it works.

 

Nice. I'll fiddle with it. Thanks

 

No, I meant I used to use Soundirok as an alternative to moode's web app but it was slow and kind of buggy so I decided to try redoing the moode ui and got ahold of Tim and have been working on it with him for a few months. Everything you've seen for the new ui is from the web app. Other than mobile playback the library panel was changed to be more like iTunes browse mode where you have three (or two in mobile) hierarchical columns with genre, artist and album. It was kind of that way before but the screen was kind of a mess, this is it now on mobile:



I don't really use the browse mode anymore (I used to instead of library) but that's like this now:



And as Tim's shown you can add a background and set opacity:



A quick note on sound quality, I found moode better as well pre-4.0 especially if you used the advanced kernels with low latency patches, I haven't compared 4.0 to the newer versions of the others or even to 3.8.4.

 

If I could love this post I would. My first question to Tim was how to improve the interface of the Library. I never search by genre. I wanted to just get rid of it just to show Artists -> Albums -> and then songs. So thank you for your hard work. I look forward too it.

So I am using Beta 12 and have been using the Beta version since version 8 or 9 that I built from scratch using the build recipe. I only have options for the Standard Kernel and can't choose Advanced like I have with 3.8.

 

When the mpd developer had a cow about moode's distribution ($10 fee) he made it seem like the only way for moode to continue would be with the build recipe model (thankfully now mostly automated by the shell scripts a few people made). One of the casualties of that was the advanced low latency kernels, but once 4.0 comes out in the next few weeks maybe there'll be more time to look into how to get those back.

 

In case anyone runs into the same issue I did with the current (January downloaded) RuneAudio image and is not inclined to troubleshoot a Linux install:

Symptoms:

• Hifiberry (or indeed any other HATs) cannot be selected in Settings -> RuneOS kernel settings -> I2S kernel modules
• Kernel rebuilds via pacman appears to have missing links and results in an unbootable system

My quick and dirty workaround was to download the version referenced by one of the developers here. It worked straight off.

 

I should really make a replacement thread for this, with tales of the now vastly improved Picoreplayer, which is what I am using now. I'll need to do some experimenting with different configurations before doing that- but it's a massive upgrade in terms of efficiency, reliability and convenience compared to the Rune/MoOoODe/whatever options (as cool as they were as a starting point).

 

Please do. I would love to hear more about Picoreplayer and how you have it configured.

I love moOde, but it is kind of buggy at times. My issue at the moment is that it will not keep up the UPP renderer. I have to go and restart the UPP every time before BubbleUPnP will find it.