What do you feed your Pi?

I send it music via AirPlay and it makes me want to pull my hair out sometimes. There has to be a better way.

 

NAS > Wi-Fi > Pi Zero W (pCP) > PI2AES. Sounds fine to me.

 

Airplay sounds like assholes. I use Audirvana -> wifi -> Pi2AES. It does not sound like assholes.

You can use any UPnP software to stream to the Pi.

 

I’m an iPhone user. Is there a way to go from Apple Music -> WiFi without using Airplay? I can stream from my MacBook Air if that is easier. I do have a license for Decibel. Perhaps that can stream via Upnp?

 

No, and no. If you're using Apple Music your only option will be airplay.

 

Hard Drive/UPnP or Roon (local or Qobuz) > two PI2AES setups > two audio setups.

I have a 1 TB Hard Drive on one of the PI2AES setups for UPnP/Roon music storage. With this, I get the best of both worlds.

 

https://darko.audio/2021/10/for-hi-fi-beginners-a-short-film-about-spotify-apple-music/

Not implying that you are a beginner, but Darko does a pretty good job of explaining what you have to do to use Apple Music or Airplay.

I have been a Mac guys for years and used to feed my Squeezebox Touch from my Mac. Once I got a server going on an RPi, I wondered why it had taken me so long to wise up. In my case, the RPi is fed by a 1 TB SSD and connected to the internet by WiFi. I use PcP for the player and server functions. I could use Spotify, etc., but I find a lot of new music on internet radio programs, so I prefer that. The RPi is always on, so I don't have to turn on the computer every time I want to play music. Plus I think the Mac is noisier than the RPi because of all the other operations going on in addition to playing music.

In your case, Grattle, you already have the RPi and Pi2AES, so put the Mac to work copying your music over to a USB hard drive/SSD, set up the Pi with Roon, Volumino, PcP, what ever you choose. Then get the control app on your phone and you are in business. I use iPeng on my iPhone to control PcP and it works great. Sounds good too.

 

The problem lies in playing music that requires Apple Music licensing. As far as I know, only the Apple Music application can play music from the Apple Music service. So copying the files isn't the issue. It's playback. I'd like to have a better method of transmitting the data than over Airplay. Even using lan cables instead of WiFi, the music is probably being resampled and "Apple-fied".

I've started to buy used cd's on ebay so I can just rip my favorite albums and have the files sit on the Pi's sd card, but I'd prefer to have the Mastered for Itunes files that I could actually relocate as needed and play using software of my choice.

Sometimes I miss the old days of Winamp and a manually managed music library on my hard disk's spinning platters. I enjoy having the worlds largest music library from Apple Music, but it's just not very flexible.

Member CD's? Member Winamp?

OHHH, I MEMBER!!!