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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
  • Allo Boss DAC
  • 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

Reply to
D.M. Procida
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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.

Reply to
Roger Bell_West

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

Daniele

Reply to
D.M. Procida

Il giorno domenica 17 dicembre 2017 22:51:27 UTC+1, D.M. Procida ha scritto:

There are many others softwares that do the same thing, maybe you'll find one that work better than Volumio (also with your touchscreen).

Bye Jack

Reply to
jack4747

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

Julf

Reply to
Johan Helsingius

"There are many others softwares that do the same thing" - sadly that's exactly my experience! :-) They nearly all have rather poor interfaces. They all try and reproduce the 'streaming' experience and ignore those of us who want to do things like playing an album as it was originally recorded (i.e. track order etc.).

I have about 10000 recordings ranging from early Cajun music to Mahler symphonies. Anything that even attempts to play a random track from this tends to get on my nerves!

--
Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

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
Reply to
RJH

The idea of somehting playing randomly... what?!

The problem is just as you describe.

Daniele

Reply to
D.M. Procida

Loads of software does just that. Even my Onkyo home cinema surround sound system does it. If you tell it to connect to the music directory on my server the default action appears to be to select a random track from the whole 10000 and run with that!

:-)

--
Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

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
Reply to
Chris Green

The random feature I'd like but will probably have to write to get is to randomly select an album and play it in track order (preferably gapless) after announcing artist and album. So I can go Nah until something I feel like listening to comes up and then forget about it for a while.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/
Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

Most software regards playing 'an album' in track order as the most unlikely thing you might want to do. Even those that manage it often default to playing it endlessly rather than just once.

--
Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

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. .

The man page says in part:

--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.

HTH

Reply to
Richard Owlett

FWIW, after much tinkering (and a lot of swearing) I settled on Exaile as my audio player.

--
Today is Boomtime, the 60th day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3183 
        Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Reply to
Huge

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.

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--
Cheers, 

John. 

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Reply to
John Rumm

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