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

I'm sorry, too much of my day job involves FFMPEG-based stuff and much craziness. I'm just not going to be able to marshall the mental energy to get into it too much here- this is one of the refuges from all that.

 

No worries, you have been a great help already

 

Super awesome guide, way helpful even with Linux experience. Thanks for the shortcuts.

My Rune install got corrupted so now I'm trying Moode. It seems to be a bit faster and more responsive but with a bit less flexibility in the configuration. Got a few more cards on the way so will experiment further.

 

My pleasure- judging by your status updates, you're hearing the difference, too- which is what it's all about.

Yeah, gotta catch 'em all. It's great to have multiple cards. Looks like the new Rune will support the Digi+ Pro out of the box, have an AP mode, and also an RO root filesystem. Volumio looks like it's about to release an update with a newer kernel too, so plenty of choice and less faff for all soon. If you have a couple of spare cards, you can always put your running system on one side and try other crazy stuff with no stress. 16GB cards are so cheap right now that everyone should have at least one, I reckon.

Weirdly, I thought Moode was more flexible but significantly less responsive on the Pi 3... It's too bad that it looks like it's going non-free soon.

If your distro of choice supports saving the config via the browser (Rune does), you can always do that, and just reflash and restore config. I think I had Volumio screw itself up once like that, but I forget. Also, don't forget, if your Linux-fu is strong and you choose not to grow the filesystem on the card, and use fdisk -l to find which blocks are in use, and then just dd those off, which is a fairly quick way to backup a total image.

 

Way too much work. I just backed up the "finished" image with the USB tool.

So I figured out the 5+ year old memory card I was using was borked - that's fine. Got a new one and everything is up and stable but now it doesn't recognize my Digi even after the kernel update. Gaaawwwwwdddddddd

"Cajoled" it back to life. Not sure what the problem was. We're back in business!

 

I think the technical term is "waving a dead chicken".

Yeah, it's crazy not to have a couple of decent-quality cards, as they are so cheap these days- means you can try alternatives, betas and other crap without having to disturb your running setup. That said, config for these audio minidistros is kinda shallow- once you've done it a couple of times, writing the card becomes the slowest part.

It makes a change for something to be actually cheap, mind!

 

I have a question about using AirPlay... I currently use airplay to stream to an airport express but have to use the analogue out as the digital out has issues with losing lock with the dac in my receiver. I don't need the full NAS streaming capability, but would it be possible to make a Raspberry Pi based device similar to an airport express, just for streaming music from an iOS device? Would the Pi based device has the same dac lock issues as the airport express? I've often thought about having a play with a Raspberry Pi, this might be a good opportunity...

Thanks,

Dave

 

Yes, you certainly can. All the usual MPD minidistros for the Pi have the facility to be an Airplay target. You can just not set the other stuff up, and have them work as just Airplay boxes if you like. Everything is optional, and usually easily configured via the web interface.

I just turned on the Airport on my Rune Audio Pi (which lives on my desktop rig) to test:



and my iPad Pro 9.7 seems to be streaming to it just fine:



Of course, I am streaming 256k AAC from it (there's not much space on the iPad, it's only the 128GB model) so it's hardly a stiff test, but so far so good. Lossless is always nicer- though don't worry, you can cross that bridge (and start faffing with a NAS full of FLAC/ALACs and all that) at some point in the future. <evil laugh>

A lot of the Apple Airport boxes have ludicrously high levels of jitter- not just the mild periodic jitter than the typical motherboard SPDIF outs have that cause blurry audio due to sidebands, but actual gross pathalogical jitter. The SPDIF receiver can sometimes have trouble phase locking to the incoming SPDIF. Although it varies from revision to revision, they range from "meh" to "shoot me now". It's a bit shocking how bad they often were.

No, the Digi+ Pro shouldn't give you the same problems. It has two separate good quality clocks (for sample rates which are multiples of 44.1 and 48kHz respectively). It will produce a surprisingly solid and clean SPDIF signal- which makes it a bit of a steal for the price. Not only will DACs have no problem locking to it cleanly, the actual sound quality produced will be significantly higher due to much lower phase noise.

In summary, sure. You can install Rune or similar on a Pi, and only set up as much as you want to use- if that's just a subset of functions, it doesn't matter. It works just fine like that.

Hope that helps..

 

Thanks for that. Looks like I might have a diy project coming up in my near future...

 

I have a couple of follow up questions...

1) Will the official 2.5A power supply be ok?

2) Is it possible to have the optical and coax outputs running at the same time? In my case, it would be great if I could have one going to my headphone dac, and the other going to the receiver that drives my speakers. Otherwise, I guess you'd have to change outputs in the software...

Thanks .

 

2.5A should be fine. I'm using a 2.5A PSU without problems.

I believe that it runs both at once, I don't think the driver even has any concept of the outputs. I can check it tonight for you, if I get time.

 

Both work at same time. (I use both outputs with PicCoreplayer)

 

Thanks for clarifying .

 

He's right, Jim... err, Dave. Confirmed, driving the Modi Multibit and Mojo at the same time happily (once I remembered where I'd put my short TOSlink cable).

 

Thanks for confirming . I ordered the components this evening, hopefully they'll be here early next week, ill post some updates once I've started putting it all together.

 

That's pretty exciting, given that you have a Vali 2 and a Modi Multibit on the way too. You're going to be busy.

Actually, prompted by your query about Airplay, I ended up finding a reliable way to use Tidal streaming through the Pi last night, which is really nice. That's probably worth adding to the posts at the start of the thread at some point. Damn- probably means I need to actually subscribe to Tidal now.

 

Yes do share.

 

If it's like other apps (e.g. Spotify) you can bring up the control center and swipe to the left to get to the audio pane and choose the airplay option at the bottom where it'll say "now playing on iPhone" (or iPad or whatever).

 

Nah, we already know about Airplay, this is how to do it under Android

Ok, I added a section to the end of the third post that explains how to use Tidal via the Pi under Android. I'm sleepy as f**k right now, so if it doesn't make sense, don't fret- I'll fix it up over the weekend if you point out stuff that needs improving. Hope that's useful.

 

I cannot give you double-likes for updating your posts but content been awesome. Was able to set things up last night using your guide and so far sounds excellent in my system. Cheers.