Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

A few weeks ago I described a music source I put together:

* Raspberry Pi
* Raspberry Pi 7" touch screen
* Volumio software https://volumio.org
* Allo Boss DAC https://www.allo.com/sparky/boss-dac.html
* music stored on a 64GB USB flash drive

(played through a 30-year-old Cyrus 1 amplifier to Royd Coniston 2
speakers).

I've been using this for a few weeks, and listening to a variety of
music on it.

The sound quality is excellent, especially given the price of the
Raspberry Pi hardware. I can recommend the Allo Boss DAC in particular.

The Volumio software - well, it works. But the interface is very rough,
in all kinds of ways.

In just about every music transport interface since the dawn of the CD,
hitting the "back" button in the middle of a track sends you back to its
start; in Volumio, it sends you to the start of the previous track.

Navigation through a music library is tiresome, and it's very difficult
to do basic things, like play an album starting with a particular track.

I'm going to try something else instead, but I don't think the other
options are significantly better.

The Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen in hopeless. When you wake it from
sleep, it registers the touch that wakes it as a command, so inevitably
you skip a track or worse. It's slow and unresponsive, and has no scroll
momentum behaviour, so it's clumsy to use (that's mostly the Raspberry
Pi's fault though). And the pixels aren't square, which is aesthetically
displeasing.

I mostly found myself controlling it via a web browser, which was not
nearly as irritating as I expected. Still, I think I will find some way
of setting up proper hardware controls on it, because jabbing at a phone
or having to go to my MacBook is no way to control what's playing.

Daniele

Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

Roger Bell_West wrote:

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.sys.raspberry-pi.]
On 2017-12-17, D.M. Procida wrote:
I mostly found myself controlling it via a web browser, which was not
nearly as irritating as I expected. Still, I think I will find some way
of setting up proper hardware controls on it, because jabbing at a phone
or having to go to my MacBook is no way to control what's playing.

Have you looked at a client/server approach? The Pi I use to provide
music at barbecues runs a streaming mp3 client pulling music off an
mpd server; any mpd client software can connect to and control that,
and I've written a web front-end too.

It *is* a client/server. The server just happens to be running on the
same machine as the client.

Daniele

Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

On 17-12-17 22:51, D.M. Procida wrote:

I'm going to try something else instead, but I don't think the other
options are significantly better.

You might want to look into picoreplayer (or something else
based on LMS, Squeezelite and the squeezebox ecosystem).

Julf

Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

On 17/12/2017 21:51, D.M. Procida wrote:
A few weeks ago I described a music source I put together:

* Raspberry Pi
* Raspberry Pi 7" touch screen
* Volumio software https://volumio.org
* Allo Boss DAC https://www.allo.com/sparky/boss-dac.html
* music stored on a 64GB USB flash drive

(played through a 30-year-old Cyrus 1 amplifier to Royd Coniston 2
speakers).

I've been using this for a few weeks, and listening to a variety of
music on it.

The sound quality is excellent, especially given the price of the
Raspberry Pi hardware. I can recommend the Allo Boss DAC in particular.

The Volumio software - well, it works. But the interface is very rough,
in all kinds of ways.

In just about every music transport interface since the dawn of the CD,
hitting the "back" button in the middle of a track sends you back to its
start; in Volumio, it sends you to the start of the previous track.

Navigation through a music library is tiresome, and it's very difficult
to do basic things, like play an album starting with a particular track.

I'm going to try something else instead, but I don't think the other
options are significantly better.

The Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen in hopeless. When you wake it from
sleep, it registers the touch that wakes it as a command, so inevitably
you skip a track or worse. It's slow and unresponsive, and has no scroll
momentum behaviour, so it's clumsy to use (that's mostly the Raspberry
Pi's fault though). And the pixels aren't square, which is aesthetically
displeasing.

I mostly found myself controlling it via a web browser, which was not
nearly as irritating as I expected. Still, I think I will find some way
of setting up proper hardware controls on it, because jabbing at a phone
or having to go to my MacBook is no way to control what's playing.


I don't mind using a smartphone to control things. App permitting, I use
a simple 'what's playing' interface - VLC works pretty well on Android
and iOS. But horses/courses etc.

I've asked for one for as a collective xmas present from the rellies -
expect a report back :-)


--
Cheers, Rob

Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

RJH wrote:
I mostly found myself controlling it via a web browser, which was not
nearly as irritating as I expected. Still, I think I will find some way
of setting up proper hardware controls on it, because jabbing at a phone
or having to go to my MacBook is no way to control what's playing.


I don't mind using a smartphone to control things. App permitting, I use
a simple 'what's playing' interface - VLC works pretty well on Android
and iOS. But horses/courses etc.

VLC is one of the "least worst" but it's still far from good.

.... and for a lot of us using a smartphone is far from ideal too, my
eyesight means I need to search for my reading glasses to see what I'm
doing and the 'keyboard' is not handy either.

There is surely quite a large (and relatively well off) oldies market
for this sort of thing.

--
Chris Green
·

Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

On 12/17/2017 03:51 PM, D.M. Procida wrote:
[snip]

The Volumio software - well, it works. But the interface is very
rough, in all kinds of ways.

In just about every music transport interface since the dawn of
the CD, hitting the "back" button in the middle of a track sends
you back to its start; in Volumio, it sends you to the start of
the previous track.

Navigation through a music library is tiresome, and it's very
difficult to do basic things, like play an album starting with
a particular track.


Although not a music fan, I've been casually following this thread.
I happened to be doing some searches in the Debian package list and
came across "draai - manage playlists and play audio files", command
line tool which I suspect could be driven by a simple script.
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/draai.

The man page https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/draai/draai.1.en.html
says in part:
/begin quote

--noshuffle (no shuffle), {-S}

Do not shuffle tracks and leave random mode untouched (default is: do
shuffle and disable random mode). See also the script dr_unsort.

/end quote

HTH

Raspberry Pi hi-fi update
 

On 17/12/2017 21:51, D.M. Procida wrote:

I'm going to try something else instead, but I don't think the other
options are significantly better.

You can get Plex as both client ans server on the Pi... not tried it,
but if it works that will make for a very much more usable interface
that understands albums etc.

http://www.rasplex.com/
https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-ras...i-plex-server/


--
Cheers,

John.

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