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

Discussion in 'Digital: DACs, USB converters, decrapifiers' started by Kattefjaes, Feb 19, 2017.

  1. Lasollor

    Lasollor Friend

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    I've tried the beta Volumio 2 with the 502DAC about a month ago. The interface had some irritating lag, no matter what I did so I eventually deleted it. But there was no problem with the music playback. I wonder if anyone else has this problem.
     
  2. gaspasser

    gaspasser Flatulence Maestro

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    I am using Volumio 2 with 502DAC and I stream Spotify. There was a lag issue but it was an issue with a plugin. Once I turned off the competing Spotify plugin it works smoothly.
     
  3. msommers

    msommers High on Epipens

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    Huge thank you to @Kattefjaes !! Got my Pi3/Digi+ Pro setup and it's running airplay. A slick device overall and the steel case makes it look pretty nice. Airplay has a ~3-4sec delay for pause/play but works and can also adjust the volume with my iPad. For what my GF needs this is perfect.

    Without your helpful instructions here I would have been hooped getting the Digi+ Pro working so thank you again!
     
  4. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    I have Volumio running on another Pi, and frankly, other than a nice album grid view, am not impressed. It's buggy as all hell- especially the much-vaunted OTA upgrader, which often bricks itself. I've had lots of weird problems with albums not showing up, as well as albums with identical titles getting conflated etc.. The worst thing is the persistent desync between the web UI and the underlying mpd/shairport playlists- often you can empty the playlist in the web interface, and it will keep playing music. This has been going on for ages, and it's shocking that it hasn't been fixed. That is as sloppy as hell and really hampers its trustworthiness when you want to encourage non-nerds into using it.

    Annoyingly, Moode Audio appears to have improved of late, a lot of the weird UI performance issues have been solved, and that works pretty well- and supports the Digi+ Pro and similar OOTB. The downside with Moode, other than that it's butt ugly, is that it no longer free. It costs $10, and it's not at all clear how many major versions this license will cover- the author could easily make another arbitrary decision and screw the users harder. The upsides are that it's very actively developed, and relatively robust, booting fast and generally working painlessly. It's a way better option than it used to be, other than the murky non-free status.

    (Note that I keep HDMI and wireless networking turned off to contribute to keeping noise levels as low as possible, so can't comment on how well those work atm.)

    I'm sort of flip-flopping between Rune and Moode now. Rune badly needs the readonly fileystem back as promised (it can sometimes get a bit mangled if you fail to shut it down cleanly). However, I do like the way it looks, and the funny android "app" that is basically a wrapped webview. It's nice to have choices.

    Oh, my pleasure. That's exactly what I was trying to do- give people enough confidence to get their feet wet and see how much you can do with good but inexpensive components (and how easy it is to get started). It's always satisfying to see someone checking in saying they're up and running, having built something useful with this stuff.

    It's just another (possibly slightly easier) form of DIY, fundamentally.
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2017
  5. DigMe

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    Just a little update since I've settled into a routine with my PI. I'm using Rune. I've got a pretty cobbled together system but I'm enjoying the quality of sound so much that I'm willing to put up with it. It would be much smoother if I had a NAS and if Rune had some built-in way to stream Tidal and Apple Music. Originally I was streaming my FLACs via Foobar2000 but at some point it started having this issue where it would always stop playing after 1 song despite checking all settings related to that. It should have continued playing the album but it wouldn't. After trying some other things I ended up using Windows Explorer to choose albums and I just right click on whatever album I want to play and select "Cast" from the pop up menu. That shoots out a side menu and I select "to Rune". It sounds like a lot but it's very quick though not ideal. This sends the albums to a queue and I can add as many as I want and they play to Rune just fine. For Tidal I use Bubble on my Kindle Fire. Yet another cobble there is that you cannot search Tidal, you can only play albums from your playlist or favorites. So I usually favorite any albums I want to listen to.

    When I type it all out it sounds horribly complicated but it doesn't feel like it in practice.
     
  6. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    Weird, I am sure I can search Tidal via Bubble.. I'll have to check.

    Also, getting a NAS running isn't as difficult or expensive as you might think. I'm just using a little two-disk Synology NAS for right now, which was really inexpensive, and works surprisingly well. Admin is really easy, too- it has a nice web interface and with good admin tools. It's a really space and power-efficient little machine, and pretty quiet. If you already have your music all nicely ripped to FLACs, you could probably have a working NAS in 15 mins flat, ready for you to copy your FLACs on.

    I guess I like it so much because using the Pi with a NAS means you get to power off your computer- less noise, less distraction, good when you're really immersing yourself in the music.

    (Also, it's great that you're hearing the sonic benefits of kicking out most of the jitter, win!)
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2017
  7. DigMe

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    I'm not at all intimidated by setting up a NAS. I just don't want to spend the money at the moment.
     
  8. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    Fair enough!
     
  9. MrTeaRex

    MrTeaRex His head's not fat, he's my brother!

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    @Kattefjaes, I've seen references to piCorePlayer a couple of times in this thread (including a couple by yourself). It appears to tick most of the functionality boxes ( lossless playback, support for the major I2S HATs, TIDAL streaming, iOS/Android remotes, etc.) as well as address the file system issues above. Is there a key piece of functionality missing from piCorePlayer that is causing you flip-flop only between Rune and Moode (i.e. incompatibility with your NAS)? I only ask because I've used piCorePlayer successfully for several years without any issues, but now I'm wondering if there's something extra I'm missing out on by not using the other options.
     
  10. haywood

    haywood Friend

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    From what the developer has said he'll charge for each major update. So I expect 4.0 to be another $10 whenever it comes out but it seems like a fair way to fund development.

    I very rarely use the actual moode web interface and if that were the only way to interface with it I'd probably be using Rune but I mostly like the front end I use (Soundirok, around $3 for iOS or Android).

    For comparison I use grid view sorted by artist, crummy collage app used to save space:

    [​IMG]

    Compare to moode:

    [​IMG]
     
  11. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    I wouldn't say that I'm "flip-flopping"; microSD cards are cheap enough that it's not prohibitively expensive to own a bunch of them, and swap them as you wish. I'm used to multibooting my computers, and don't think I exactly "flip-flop" between Windows, MacOS and Linux installs (ok, so I might have flip-flopped a bit on the BSDs, OpenVMS, Solaris etc., but let's conveniently ignore that).

    I guess it's just very convenient and simple to write a single image to a card, and five minutes later have a working player controllable with a nice web interface from anywhere on your network, and not have to worry about where you're running an LMS instance, spurious mobile apps and so forth. MPD is really light and effective, and does the job.

    Yes, I know, you could run LMS directly on a piCore box, but this whole thread started as an exercise in doing cheap, good quality audio playback with the minimum of hassle. A slightly less nervous user could install piCore, run LMS on it, manually mount some remote filesystems, and then find out which of the legion of paid Squeezebox controllers they actually liked, and have a perfectly good system. Those users also don't need a primer like this, however.

    (That's actually the first thing I tried- on my original first gen Pi, playback was horribly prone to dropouts, and Volumio via MPD worked a lot better. That said, piCore was just fine on my pi3.)

    However, having done both, I feel like the MPD and web interface is more friendly and accessible, so I documented that approach. Done well, a piCore setup can be great- if you have a particular controller app that you really enjoy, it's a very good (and free) option. It's a bit more fiddly to set up*, and you do really need an external controller, but it's good and works well.

    There's nothing to stop someone trying both. As I said above, microSD cards are cheap, these days. I suspect that if there was a nice web controller for the LMS/squeezebox stuff, I'd be using that already. Maybe if Rune stagnates and Moode becomes too much of a shakedown exercise, I'll jump ship anyway. I do hope that if I decide to document that alternative, that I can make it a bit shorter :)

    (Also, I hate the LMS web interface- having to grab a device and open an app to control the playback also feels like a bit of an affront now I'm used to being able to use any handy browser!)



    *Especially now that both Rune and Moode support the Digi+ Pro OOTB.
     
    Last edited: Jun 16, 2017
  12. bigbear1997

    bigbear1997 Acquaintance

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    May I know if I can use a 64G TF card, partition 8G for the OS say Rune and leave the rest for local media storage to be accessed by Rune?
     
  13. Xen

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    Yes, if Rune is distributed like other raspbian OS distributions. You write the image to your card, then it depends on the distribution. Rune might have a setting that expands the filesystem size to fill the TF card (huh, Trans-Flash is the original name for microSD) under its options menu. I have not used Rune, but moOde does have that option. If not, you can open run a terminal under any flavor of raspbian and use the command
    Code:
    sudo raspi-config
    and select the option to expand the filesystem size.
     
  14. bigbear1997

    bigbear1997 Acquaintance

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    Had been playing with runeaudio & volumio.
    Noticed runeaudio seems to consume less resources (ie., ram & cpu).

    Tried the underclock trick on volumio but it is not powerful enough to play DSD. I am getting dropouts. Flac & etc runs fine. Not really noticed any SQ improvement though.
     
  15. Xen

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    As long as SQ doesn't decrease and you like the benefits of running your audio through a Pi, then |\/| all's good, right?
     
  16. mitochondrium

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    I do not use a Pi but the software I use runs on Pi, too. I use Archphile and control it through MPoD. Archphile is very lean and basic. It does not run a server to display cover artwork but this feature can be implemented. Maybe I will give Soundirok a try. As for nice frontends for LMS. I also have an UPboard (bo ARM architecture) because I tried Daphile (which is LMS based). The Daphile front end is not to my liking so I got iPeng (9€ if I remember well). I found iPeng to be ok.
     
  17. Pyruvate

    Pyruvate Friend

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    Raspberry Pi noob here, but I should be able to use the EITR in place of the DIGI+? Trying to build myself a cheap streamer, mainly to use Spotify Premium.
     
  18. damaged-goods

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    Yes, no problem. I've been using one with moode audio. Sounds better than the DIGI+.
     
  19. starence

    starence Facebook Friend

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    So far, I haven't been able to find a perfect solution for streaming Spotify on RPi. I've mostly used librespot on moode, it has some quirks though, and sometimes it refuses to connect altogether. I'm not sure if there's a better option out there, but I tired of fighting to get Spotify to work consistently, so I'm mostly using my Windows machine now.
     
  20. DigMe

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    Bubble UPnP has worked consistently for me through Rune.
     

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