Dummies Guide to Pi2AES! Throw away your PC or laptop.

Discussion in 'Digital: DACs, USB converters, decrapifiers' started by purr1n, Jan 29, 2020.

  1. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Silly question, but you have the Bifrost set on the optical input? Do you have anything else that will run on the optical input?
     
  2. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    I do have it set on the optical output. I cycled through all of them. I don’t actually know if I have anything here that will run optical. I’ll have to see if the Mac Pro can give me some uptime.

    I have the coax cable coming this week, so I catch your drift and might just have to wait until then.
     
  3. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    I haven’t used Moode before, but are you sure you have it configured to the correct output card? Should be the Digi+ Pro I believe.
     
  4. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    Welp, it’s something optical in nature. Either the optical cable, the Pi2AES optical, or the Bifrost optical is bad. I found an old subwoofer RCA cable and used it and got working.

    edit: just swapped optical cables and we’re all set. Sometimes it’s the obvious stuff you should check first. Thanks @rlow
     
  5. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Toslink cables and receivers in general are known to be shitty and fail, so no great surprise there. Glad you got it working, yes any RCA cable will do, but in general one specifically for digital audio “should” be better (maybe), but in the meantime, enjoy!
     
  6. CEE TEE

    CEE TEE MOT: NITSCH

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    Thanks @purr1n for this Dummies Guide! Got mine up and running in one evening, really like the sound of this even without my best DAC and with TOSLink. I have a dedicated 2TB drive stuck to it. I have been unhappy forever with Mac as the player for different reasons, this is a great alternative.

    One thing to note in Volumio set-up, it is designed to get you to sign up for a free trial that goes into subscription after the first month. You have to do certain sequential steps that are mandatory but when the wizard tries to get you to sign up for "MyVolumio", try to skip past it to complete the set-up without doing that. Volumio and my Pi would only "see" the drives after I somehow got through the set-up without it seeing the drives and getting past the "MyVolumio" thing. (It was late, I'm not sure if it was actually putting the drives onto a powered USB hub that helped or how exactly I got through that part.)

    Price is great, it's really small...but man it has cables coming out of it that make it a lot bigger in practice. Will need to figure out cables to get footprint as minimized as possible.

    PS Audio & i2S:
    On the Pi Hat thread here, Mike Kelly showed design for his new PS Audio i2S over HDMI adapter board he is making. I can't wait to try that. PS Audio should be sending my PWD back this week.
     
  7. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    I’ve skimmed through many, but not all, of the preceding 32 pages and didn’t see a guide for MoOde. Would it be helpful for me to write one up?
     
  8. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    So You’ve Decided to Install MoOde: A Primer

    Some necessary disclaimers:
    • First, I’m not an expert at anything Raspberry Pi, digital audio, or MoOde related. I’m just some dude on the Internet who installed MoOde and thought I’d share the steps I took.
    • Second, I don’t necessarily endorse MoOde because I’ve used it for the sum total of six minutes so far.
    • Third, I’m doing this using SSH instead of the Rasberry Pi interface because that’s what I’m used to doing. I won’t be writing a similar guide using any other methods. You’ll want to leave this connected to ethernet throughout the install, I’ll explain later.
    • Finally, I cribbed heavily from this thread on MoOde's forums. I added some insights and omitted things I didn't understand. If you are looking for support, I'd try there.
    Onward.

    First thing you’re going to want to do is to start with a clean install of Raspberry Pi OS on a blank micro SD card. MoOde is an entire OS, so this is going to f**k up anything you have on that card. Just start with a clean copy. When I do that, I start by using the Raspberry Pi Imager for macOS.
    [​IMG]
    Choose the Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) from this menu, or install the Raspberry Pi OS in the manner in which you are accustomed. I’m not your dad.

    Ok, once the operating system has been written to the SD card, LEAVE THE SD CARD WHERE IT IS and do the following to enable SSH:
    • Open your computer’s terminal
    • Change the directory you’re working in to the boot folder of the SD card’s Raspberry Pi install. Using Terminal on the Mac, the easiest way I’ve found to do this is to type ‘cd ‘ and then drag and drop the folder icon for the boot folder from Finder into the Terminal window. That will autofill the correct path.
    • Create a file called ‘ssh’ on in this folder by typing the following command ‘touch ssh’. It may ask you to use sudo, in which case type ‘sudo touch ssh’ instead. You’re doing great.
    With the OS installed and SSH enabled, let’s move to the MoOde part.

    Use the @purr1n method to find what IP address your Raspberry Pi’s been assigned. Then type ‘ssh [email protected]’ (replacing the x’s with your values, of course). It may ask you some authentication question. Just type yes, then use the admin password of 'raspberry' when asked.

    Next, get to the Raspberry Pi’s home folder by changing directories using ‘cd /home/pi’. Once you’ve changed the directory, you’ll want to go grab MoOde from the server. You’ll need the Internet for this. Type (or more likely copy/paste) ‘sudo wget -q http://moodeaudio.org/downloads/mos/mosbuild.sh -O /home/pi/mosbuild.sh’ and hit enter.

    Next, type ‘sudo chmod +x /home/pi/mosbuild.sh’ and hit enter.

    To launch the installation wizard, type ‘sudo ./mosbuild.sh’ and hit enter. It’ll ask you some questions in quick succession (quick only in that one immediately follows the one before it, not, like, lightning round shit). Your responses are in bold:
    • Write OS build directly to the boot SDCard? -> type ‘y
    • Do you have a backup of your boot SDCard? -> type ‘y
    • Enter Current Date (YYYY-MM-DD) -> enter date in that format
    • Make corrections -> type ‘n
    • Use a proxy server for Internet access -> type ‘n
    • Use a WIFI instead of Ethernet? -> type ‘n’ (Note: You can change this setting later. At some point the MoOde OS will take over the wifi setting, so setting this to no right now means that you’ll lose wifi connectivity somewhere through the install. That’s why I told you to leave ethernet connected for now. Don’t you listen?)
    • Proceed with build -> type ‘y
    • Power off the Pi -> type ‘y
    • Wait a little bit for the Pi to seem like it’s done thinking and then unplug it.
    You’re ready to move to the part where you, as a person, don’t do shit for hours. Ready? Let’s go.

    Plug in the power cable. Now we wait. The Pi will reboot itself nine times (NINE TIMES) during the installation period, which for me was an hour and eighteen minutes. You can monitor installation progress by SSHing back into the Pi, but be aware – your password has now changed to ‘moodeaudio’ from ‘raspberry’. So type ‘ssh [email protected]’ (again replacing the x’s with your IP information) and then ‘moodeaudio’ and then ‘moslog’ to get the latest information.

    Every time the Pi reboots (NINE TIMES) you'll need to repeat the steps in the paragraph above. When you’re done, you’ll get a screen that looks similar to this:
    [​IMG]
    If your Pi is plugged directly into your router, you can likely access MoOde through typing ‘http://moode.local’ in your browser on your computer or phone (unless you’re using Android). If you’re on Android or you’re using some other connection method, type the IP address into your browser instead. You’ll be greeted with the ugly MoOde interface.

    Click the ‘m’ icon in the top right corner, then ‘Configure,’ then ‘Audio’ to configure your shit. Change your I2S device to HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro and click SET. You’ll have to reboot after a bunch of these changes, so make a whole set of them first and THEN reboot. If you’re using AirPlay, Bluetooth, or Spotify, scrooooooll on down till you hit the Renderers section and turn them on. You can set the name of the endpoints (what shows up in the AirPlay or Spotify Connect menus when you stream to them). Click “Restart” to reboot the Pi and make those changes stick.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    You can click “Network” at the very top of the screen to dick around with wifi settings if you’d like. You’ll need to reboot here as well.

    Finally, change your password lest some Chinese hackers weaponize your Pi2AES and use it to steal the nuclear launch codes squirreled away on your network.
    [​IMG]

    That’s all I’ve got for you. I only added AirPlay and Spotify. Haven’t added hard drives yet. That’s a story for another time, but this should get you rolling with MoOde.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Sep 20, 2020
  9. loadexfa

    loadexfa MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    It's worth noting that you can flash the MoOde installation directly to an SD Card from a Win/Mac/Linux system. This skips the initial setup steps and is much quicker than 9 reboots ;) . From what I've seen the same holds true for all the various popular Pi players.
     
  10. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    Good to know! I figured it was faster just to install straight from the server but I guess that doesn’t make sense.
     
  11. haywood

    haywood Friend

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    You can also do multiple setup steps at once even though it says to reboot after some, like set up network, set audio interface, flip toggles in system, expand file system, etc. The only caution I’d have is if you run the 64-bit kernel and the experimental (like a stable nightly basically) version of mpd it may have issues on the initial library scan (though this may have been fixed since I last looked at it, dunno).

    The 7.0 version of moode coming soon has some nice audio goodies, it’ll have custom soxr recipes for upsampling (this will be available for all mpd players eventually as it was accepted into the main build) and selective resampling that gives you more control over how it resamples, like you can set it to only scale by powers of 2 so 16/44.1 scales to 24/176.4 and 16/48 scales to 24/192, or if you have a vintage dac and high-res audio files on your server you can resample everything down to an elder-friendly target bitrate based on powers of 2 scaling as well. Anecdotally pi2aes with modius on the 64-bit kernel (has better latency) with “experimental” mpd and selective resampling to 24/192 sounds way better than any budget setup has any right to.
     
  12. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    I installed Volumio last night on a different SD card to compare it to MoOde. I have the Roon plugin enabled, and I'm looking in Roon and it gives me five options for endpoints (they're in there as unnamed because I deleted the names I gave them to make them more easily identifiable for troubleshooting).

    upload_2020-9-21_11-49-59.png

    Which would I choose if using either coax or optical? My first thought was snd_rpi_hifiberry_digi since that's the I2S device I chose for Pi2AES, but I'm wondering whether bcm2835 ALSA is the right choice. I'm assuming the HDMI and Headphones options are incorrect since I'm not using HDMI or the 3.5mm out.
     
  13. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    The hifiberry one. Pretty sure the bcm2835 would be pointing to the chipset on RPi board, which you don’t want.
     
  14. porkfriedpork

    porkfriedpork Friend

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    Has anyone got moode working with Quboz app? I’m not having much luck with quboz app on any of the servers I try.
     
  15. loadexfa

    loadexfa MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    Directly using the Qobuz app? No, I tried with both Volumio and MoOde with no luck and support says something to the effect, "yes, we know it's in development still".

    I ended up going with Audirvana (supports both Tidal and Qobuz) which has been working well for me with both MoOde and Volumio. I tried a few other free options but found then unreliable and quirky. Others recommend Bubble UPNP so it's possible that I'm weird or something about my network sucks.
     
  16. NationOfLaws

    NationOfLaws Friend

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    I got Qobuz working with Volumio with no effort. There’s a plug-in for Volumio that seems relatively new. I only got Qobuz to work on MoOde through AirPlay, which is to say I didn’t get it to work.
     
  17. loadexfa

    loadexfa MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    Ahh, yeah, I should add more details. With the paid version of Volumio, I got Qobuz and Tidal working no problem. I don't know if the plug-in has gone free since then. Airplay also works for me but if you want to do UPNP or similar Audirvana has been the easiest that I found. I never tried Roon, probably easy there too.
     
  18. LetMeBeFrank

    LetMeBeFrank Won't tell anyone my name is actually Francis

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    BubbleUPnP also casts Qobuz to any UPnP server, including moOde.
     
  19. Metro

    Metro Friend

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    Does the
    On Audirvana, can you add and remove albums/tracks from your Qobuz favorites? On Volumio, It works for Tidal but there is an error for Qobuz. Wondering if the problem is on the Qobuz or Volumio side.
     
  20. loadexfa

    loadexfa MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    Yup, you can search and add/remove favorites using Audirvana. It doesn't sort them properly for Qobuz (only sorts on date added) but this is an issue with Qobuz, same happens on Volumio. Supposedly Qobuz needs to add this feature to their API.

    I think it would be possible to gather a minimal subset of the favorite data and then allow sorting in the client. I guess massive favorite lists could be an issue but still seems odd that nobody is able to handle this.
     

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