Raspberry pie, anybody?

[John EH]

I've cleaned up the page with some screenshots and tried to be a tad more concise about a couple of things.  Anyway it is more information than I had initially and it's kinda all in one place now.  I should add that it is specific to that HiFiMeDIY Sabre DAC and Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite Player.  Go another route and you're on your own.

John

http://www.hagensieker.com/styled-9/index.html

[John EH]

Couple more lessons I learned throughout all this.

Once you get squeezeplug installed the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi Firmware.  It resides on the SD Card so it follows the card and doesn't actually change anything on the board.

Anyway at a command prompt run

rpi-update

Let it do its thing.  Should help if you have any stability issues.

Last gotcha I had was I had two cheap wireless dongles that I was running.  Both were based on the Realtek rt2800 chipset.

I've been having nightly crashes.  After poking around on Google for a couple days I found a couple pages that basically say "Oh my God, don't use rt2800 chipset on Raspberry Pi, it works but crashes, etc, etc, etc.

Seems one of the more stable chipsets is the RT8192cu

The Edimax EW-7811Un 150 is one such wireless dongle.  I went down to the local electronics store in Japan and no Edimax here but I found a Planex that has the same chipset.

Go to a prompt and type this:

/etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf

You'll see nothing as it's a new file.  Paste this in and save it:

options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0

Reboot.

That file turns off the power management of the wifi dongle so it doesn't sleep on you.

The last part of the command turns off usb auto suspend.

This should keep you rock solid.

John

[John EH]

Found out my HiFiMeDiy Dac wasn't playing in 24 bit 96000 and found I had to alter the program launch command a bit.  It's all on my website now works like a champ.

Seemed unless you call the program and tell it to start in 24_3 it will try to start in 24LE and fail and downsample back to 16 bit.  48000.  I was all happy at 16 bit 48000 until I found out I wasn't running at 24 bit and set out on a mission to make it work.

It's working great and I'm enjoying it so much I ordered two more of those DAC's.  One for downstairs at home and one to build up a system at work.

John

[caffeinator]

Hey JohnEH,

Thank you for the website - that's a huge help.

At the risk of exposing quite a bit of ignorance, a couple of questions:

-I'm lost on the system topology...is the RPi just sitting on the network, or is there an RPi connected to the music file NAS, or is there one at each place one wants to listen to music from the network?

-Likewise, is there a DAC at each RPi?

Judging from the picture, it appears you've got an RPi and DAC connected as a source in a listening area.

If there were more than one RPi on the network, would all RPi's on the network be playing the same music at the same time?  I had gotten a Squeezebox Touch and wanted to be able to have the same Pandora stream playing throughout the house on a few different systems.

If someone could describe the system topology, I could take a crack at making a block diagram to post (for other dunderheads like me who need a USA Today Infographic to understand anything more complex than a reel mower).

Oddly, I was just finding some pieces in the garage I'd gathered to build a cheap NAS a few years ago, and was thinking of ditching them...sounds like they might be useful to make a music serving NAS, though.

[John EH]

The RPi just sits on the network.  Because it is running Linux you can use Samba file sharing (included in Squeezeplug and easy to set up) to talk to your network shares.  I have an external hard drive on my router which I just copied my iTunes Library over to.

I have thee systems in my house now.  UpSqueeze and DownSqueeze which are Raspberry Pi's and I have a Squeezebox Radio. 

There is a DAC on each Raspberry Pi.  Both of mine are on the same wireless network and both can see the iTunes library on my routers external hard drive via Samba.

You can indeed synchronize your players so that they play the same music and I have had the same music playing out of all three at the same time.  But you do not have to synchronize them.  They can play independently as well.  I listen to one thing upstairs and the gf can listen to whatever she wants to downstairs.

I have to say that if your intention is to build a bulletproof  "Squeezebox" that Raspberry Pi may not be the way to go.  You might be better off to get a small computer that has passive cooling so you have no fan noise and put Linux on it.

I've been having a blast with my Raspberry Pi as you can see on my web page I have also had to issue about a million commands and write scripts and cron jobs to keep it going.  I had a heck of a time getting rid of the pops and clicks and distortion on the DAC and a heck of a time with it crashing daily.  I seem to have it all worked out and it seems rock solid now with an experimental firmware I found.  I think if you follow my web page with the Raspberry Pi and do EVERYTHING I did it is pretty stable and sounds great.  If you discard a few of my steps it's likely to be a crashing nightmare.  if you like to tinker like I do it's no problem but if you want something that is 100% set and forget build a proper Linux box or get another Squeezebox Touch.

Having said that I think it really sounds amazing.  The HiFiMeDIY DAC is AWESOME, and made all that much more awesome because it is $30 to $40 depending on where you buy it from.  I'd say my RPi squeezeboxes sound better than my Tube CD player, my iMod iPod with a Brown Burr DAC modified to use the headphone jack as a true Line Out, and better than any CD, DVD player I've had on the system.

Plus having basically every album and every artist available at the touch of my iPhone is awesome.  I have Pandora and MOG and if I had to do it all over again I'd just get MOG. 

[caffeinator]

Thanks again, John EH.

Between your posts, your helpful website and the Squeezeplug site, it is becoming a lot clearer.

I think I'll start with a fanless computer and put Linux on it.  In fact, I found (while searching for a cheap SBC in a box) an Atom-based netbook (refurb'ed ASUS eeePC 901) for about $99 that should run Linux fine...makes it hard to go for the Squeezebox Touch at MSRP, much less current prices, and even the RPi seems a questionable bargain (apart from its compactness and tweak-fetishist attraction, I think) with that option in mind.

Once I've learned to get things streaming on the netbook, I will add more nodes to the music network, either via netbook if I can find another cheap one, compact computer or RPi...hard to resist trying the RPi, though, to see what all the fuss is about.

I take it the HiFiMeDIY DAC isn't a source of any instability and is two thumbs way up as you see it?  I have some other USB DACs around the house that I can resurrect to connect before I need to start trying others...if I can find them...though again, the HiFiMeDIY DAC is hard to resist trying...particularly if I end up using it on the bedroom setup...how can I pass up a chance to say "...hey baby, wanna come upstairs and see my dongle?"

[John EH]

The HiFiMeDIY DAC is solid in my opinion.  Works like a champ although it took a little tweaking to get it working in Raspian and Squeezeplug.

The list of DAC's that work in Linux is I think a fairly short list

Here is a list of supported DAC's and may or may not be all inclusive

http://www.raspyfi.com/raspberry-pi-usb-dac-and-raspyfi-supported-dacs/

For $40 I think you'll be surprised.

John

[Jim R.]

John,

That list looks much longer and more inclusive than last time.  If you lookk at the dac chips and reciever chips supported, than for the most part it is fairly reasonable to assume that other dacs with the same chips/receivers should work as well.  Example, with both the older hiface interfaces supported, then dacs like the metrums and jkenny should also work.  If the TAS1020b in asynch mode (HRT) works, than many of the other devices based on this should work, including AQ dragonfly, the majority of the HRT family, etc.  Interesting that one 24.384 dac works -- they must have fixed the usb issues or that would not likely work.

Does the dac it you got require any SMT soldering?

Thanks,

Jim

[John EH]

John,

That list looks much longer and more inclusive than last time.  If you lookk at the dac chips and reciever chips supported, than for the most part it is fairly reasonable to assume that other dacs with the same chips/receivers should work as well.  Example, with both the older hiface interfaces supported, then dacs like the metrums and jkenny should also work.  If the TAS1020b in asynch mode (HRT) works, than many of the other devices based on this should work, including AQ dragonfly, the majority of the HRT family, etc.  Interesting that one 24.384 dac works -- they must have fixed the usb issues or that would not likely work.

Does the dac it you got require any SMT soldering?

Thanks,

Jim

Jim,

No SMT soldering required by me.  Just plug and play.

I think your assumption that other DAC's with the same chips would probably work is correct.

Check my webpage about the USB issues.  Somebody has an experimental firmware that's working great for me.  I have 3 days and 9 hours of current uptime.  If the USB issue isn't fixed it's a lot better than it was.  Before that firmware I'd only stay up 9-12 hours at a time.

John

[John EH]

If anybody is interested I ordered the HiFiMeDIY Sabre Tiny USB DAC by mistake.  It has the PCM2706+ES9023 Dac Chip.

I can confirm it works just as the non tiny HiFiMeDIY Sabre USB DAC does albeit in 16/48.

I was going to send it back for an exchange but I have a system I only stream from that pulls down 16/41 on the best station so no need to go all the way.

I may be "wrong" in saying this but I swear it sounds better than its big brother.

John

[John EH]

Today I was in Hiroshima at the big time high end audio shop and picked up a Nuforce Udac2 for about $135.  I can confirm it works perfectly with Raspberry Pi and Squeezelite.

For my money though, so far, the HiFiMeDIY Sabre USB DAC's sound better.  I'll give it a little time to break in. 

It's a keeper for sure and if I don't like it too much as much I'll just take it to work and put it in the office system.


John

[ice9mike]

John EH,

Thanks so much for the great write up. It really helped me set this up on my RP. I love it. Makes me want to set one up in each room.

I did find that the volume was a bit low at first. I adjusted it using alsamixer from the SSH client. It was only at 40% to start off with. I would suggest that this step be added to your write up.

Thanks again,

ice9mike

[John EH]

Thanks Mike.  I'm on the Alsamixer thing.  I had to goose mine up as well on all my systems.  Good catch.

John

[mpeg2]

Just finished off 2 music source projects with the Raspberry Pi - very happy with both:

1) Raspyfi - MPD server drawing music from my network. Used a distribution available at: http://www.raspyfi.com - these guys stripped out most things not needed for music, added the bits necessary to solve the USB audio issues and set it up so that it runs an MPD server daemon on boot. I've got it connected to a Behringer DAC (which seems to sound pretty good) and connected into my Stereomour amp. At the other end of the wifi network is currently about 32GB of music on a flash drive shoved into a port on my router (later, I want to set up a real NAS, with lossless rips from my CDs). The nice thing is that this runs headless & is controlled by an MPD client (I've got one on an iPad, another on an Android phone and a 3rd on my Mac). This works really well, sounds great & wasn't too hard to set up (most of the issues were my stupic mistakes with Linux).

2) Pandora Player - from an Adafruit Tutorial - http://learn.adafruit.com/pi-wifi-radio - another headless Raspberry Pi, but with a 2 line LCD + some buttons attached for control. When turned on, this thing connects to my Pandora account & starts playing. You can control volume, Pandora "Station", Play/pause and skip via the buttons. For this, I'm using the audio output on the Pi (figuring that with Pandora over the internet, it probably doesn't matter that much).

Both of these sound great & weren't too tough to get running (and taught me a lot in the process)...

   Rich

[Natural Sound]

2) Pandora Player - from an Adafruit Tutorial - http://learn.adafruit.com/pi-wifi-radio - another headless Raspberry Pi, but with a 2 line LCD + some buttons attached for control. When turned on, this thing connects to my Pandora account & starts playing. You can control volume, Pandora "Station", Play/pause and skip via the buttons. For this, I'm using the audio output on the Pi (figuring that with Pandora over the internet, it probably doesn't matter that much).

I went the same route. I talked about it in this thread http://www.bottlehead.com/smf/index.php/topic,2742.30.html I can say without hesitation that using an external DAC does in fact make a difference. At first I didn't think it would either, until I tried it. From what I've read the DAC that's embedded in the Pi's Broadcom chip is only 12 bit. I'm using a relatively inexpensive 16 bit USB DAC and the difference is pretty dramatic even when streaming Pandora.