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

I use moOde with a digi+, works very well and a breeze to set up

 

I’m using the digi+ pro and still using Rune just because I’m a creature of habit and I like simplicity. It has worked for me so I haven’t ever had an urge to try anything else.

 

Digi+ Pro and volumio here. Works great.

 

Running Moode Audio on 2 Digi+ Pros, 1 Digi+ and 1 Allo Digione. Runs great and is always being updated. I like that the developer Tim Curtis is very active and engaged in the Moode forum.

 

I have been running Volumio on with the Digi+ Pro for... probably over a year now. It's been up for months on end without me having to initiate a reboot (maybe around Christmas when I powered down the area it's located in).

 

Digi+ Pro for a few years, no real issues. Raspbian and simple bit-perfect mpd, with mpdroid from my Galaxy. Too easy.

 

I now have my Raspberry Pi 3 set up with the Digi+ Pro running the latest stable release of Volumio, chain is BJC Coax > PT-100 > A-150 > KEF Ref Three.

Previously I was running Rasplex and using USB out to the PT-100. I was getting blips every so often, very noticeable on sustained notes, like the beginning of Bohemian Rhapsody, or the synth interlude on Xanadu. Research showed me this was just the limitations of the USB output of the RPi3.

My impressions of the Digi+ Pro are very positive. No blips or any other audio nasties can be detected. Also, not sure how to describe it, but the treble sounds much cleaner now. I suspect Rasplex audio output is re-sampled in some way before sending over USB.

More good news is that I didn't have to mount any shared folders, I was able to find my Plex server under the "Media Servers" section and instantly access all my music as before.

 

I've tried RuneAudio in the past and was very disappointed with the latency and responsiveness of the UI.
I'm setting up a secondary system and needed a way to access my music... perfect excuse for another project.

To cut costs (don't want to buy another DAC), I went with the hifiberry dac+ pro. I put it in a Parmetal case with a Schaffner filtered IEC socket and AMB sigma11 PSU.
I went with LMS (Logitech Media Server) and piCorePlayer on the RPI. I am very impressed with the responsiveness of these 2 together... changing a song on the server or from my iPhone immediately gets played on the player.

One thing that was very important for me was to have a nice character display, so found the `Slimmer` project on Github.
I like showing sample/bit rates so modified the code to show that at the top right instead of the playlist queue. (not shown in photo)

Its coming together nicely.. just waiting for my front and rear panels from FPE to finish this off.
The RPI will be mounted to the rear so that USB and ethernet will be accessible.
RCA's will be panel mounted

 

I don't have any issues with the USB out of my Pi Zero W running piCorePlayer to Eitr, and that is less powerful than an rPi3.

 

What I should've said was my personal raspberry pi 3 has USB issues with audio, rather than a sweeping statement about the device in general. It's been a problem with my Pi for a while.

 

Sweeping statement is fine in this case, pi 3 USB is crap. Ethernet, wi-fi are implemented through USB. Any network traffic may potentially interfere with your USB. In some cases it may be fine but generally USB on pi 3 has to be avoided.

 

Maybe I don't have any issues because I'm using Wi-Fi to connect to my network which looks to be implemented with SDIO, leaving USB free to concentrate on outputting music.

I only know as much as I needed to get my system running, but this says the radio chip is the BCM43438, and there's no mention of USB in the datasheet: https://www.cypress.com/file/298076/download

 

I use piCorePlayer on my standalone player. I like it: simple, lean, fast.

 

Besides some software tweaks, this is mostly done. Pretty happy with how it came out, except the cost!

 

With the right branding and buzzwords, you could charge > $1K for that

 

I have an Oppo BDP-103 currently hooked up as an SPDIF source for my headphone rig, but it takes up a lot of space on my desk and I really don't need the CD player or video processing part of the whole thing. Considering trading/selling the Oppo for an Allo DigiOne+ or one of the other I2S SPDIF hats. They are pretty reasonably priced and I'm not unfamiliar with Linux and headless music servers although it's been a while. My question is basically just: is the DigiOne+ considered the go-to, best bang for buck, RPi to SPDIF solution?

Also, one of the things I like about the Oppo is built-in Tidal support... does RPi have a Tidal option too? Or at least some way to get Tidal through the thing?

edit: I'm willing to pay for JRiver Media Center on Linux which iirc should be able to stream Tidal, but I'm not sure if it could also run headlessly... I just used shit like Clementine and mpd in the past.

 

I've run a pi with picoreplayer (PCP), and I had tidal working on it. I think you needed a LMS account to do it, it was a while ago when I tried it.

There are likely other ways to do it, I'm pretty sure I ran tidal using a phone running the bubbleupnp app, and running minimserver on another machine.

 

I made this page maybe a year ago, describes setting up pcp
https://sites.google.com/site/pijblspeaker/software/picoreplayer

There is a section that describes how to setup for tidal.

If you run LMS on it too, and I don't describe the LMS setup, but there is lots of info out there on the subject.

 

@ohshitgorillas - see also @gixxerwimp 's posts #306 & #307 on p. 16 of this thread for setting up PCP with LMS.

Tidal streaming will also work with Volumio (though I can't remember if there's a plugin for Volumio free or if you need the subscription version, which has the capability baked in).

 

For those considering the RPi 4 for a streamer.

TL;DW, it may be worse sounding than the RPi 3, even with an audio HAT board (potentially due to increase in processing power and the speed of ports creating more electrical noise, which in theory makes sense):