DAC Time! Which one?

[Fishstix]

Hey 20,

The 24/192 files *are* in .wav format. RuneAudio will play .flac, .aac and .alac, I believe. I don't have anything in those other formats, though it sounds like they are all working well.

I store my music on a couple larger-format USB thumb drives. Other options are NAS drives, and external USB drives, so long as they have their own power source. The Raspberry Pi boards only offer 2A of power throughput, so things that spin up a drive or are large current draws don't work well. For instance, I have a spin-up external USB hard drive that requires USB power, so I could only use that by attaching it to my NAS ready router. Not real difficult.

The player is the RuneAudio operating system on the Raspberry PI (B+ model in my case.) The RuneOS paired with the onboard Rpi computer directs the file stream through the I2S pins into my onboard dac. You might choose a different DAC board, or a digital tolsink output board, or just use the raspberry pi USB ports to out put to a standalone DAC. In the above photo you can sort of see the secondary board stacked on top? That's the HiFiBerry DAC board. It comes with standard RCA jacks, which I desoldered so I could wire the board to external jacks. I like the short circuit path as much as anything. The first iteration of this was literally the stacked boards sitting behind my AV cabinet. Worked like a charm, though not as pretty.

In this photo you can see the backside of my build. Power in, a fuse holder, RCA analog outputs, USB ports with one flash drive for media storage, and an ethernet port. In my setup I've hardwired the RPi via CAT-5 to my router, and I access/manage the whole thing wirelessly with a tablet through my router. You can evidently use a wireless dongle to accomplish the same thing if you don't want to run CAT-5, but there are still a few bugs being worked out in that department.

My technical writing skills are... still improving. A feature list can be found here... http://www.runeaudio.com/features/ Hopefully that answers some of your questions? Hit me up if you have more, I am happy to help where I can.

Cheers!
-Fishstix

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[20to20]

Hey 20,

The player is the RuneAudio operating system on the Raspberry PI (B+ model in my case.) The RuneOS paired with the onboard Rpi computer directs the file stream through the I2S pins into my onboard dac. You might choose a different DAC board, or a digital tolsink output board, or just use the raspberry pi USB ports to out put to a standalone DAC. In the above photo you can sort of see the secondary board stacked on top? That's the HiFiBerry DAC board. It comes with standard RCA jacks, which I desoldered so I could wire the board to external jacks. I like the short circuit path as much as anything. The first iteration of this was literally the stacked boards sitting behind my AV cabinet. Worked like a charm, though not as pretty.

In this photo you can see the backside of my build. Power in, a fuse holder, RCA analog outputs, USB ports with one flash drive for media storage, and an ethernet port. In my setup I've hardwired the RPi via CAT-5 to my router, and I access/manage the whole thing wirelessly with a tablet through my router. You can evidently use a wireless dongle to accomplish the same thing if you don't want to run CAT-5, but there are still a few bugs being worked out in that department.

Stix,

You've found the secret sauce!

I've been burning my 24/192 .wav files to DVD-A (DVD Audio) format and using a DVD player that can read them. But I've been searching for a stand alone player that can read a native 24/192 .wav so that I can just leave them in that format on a DVD. I've been reading bits about the RPi and thought about jumping in, too. So in this case you have the RuneOS booting the RPi and then a RuneAudio player that is a seperate installed program? Or is that just a part of the RuneOS? I went to the web site but didn't linger.

Great project! Thanks for sharing it,

20

[Fishstix]

Hey 20,

So in this case you have the RuneOS booting the RPi and then a RuneAudio player that is a seperate installed program? Or is that just a part of the RuneOS?

Yes and No. The RuneOS *does* boot the RPI, and handles all the important functions of moving music around. What we see as the RuneAudio player is a WebUI. When you boot up your Rpi, the OS establishes a local IP address, which you direct your smartphone/browser to. The browser loads up the WebInterface from the OS, which handles the playlists, stop/start and stuff. Which is really why I got on board with the project. I was tired of having wires running out to a mobile device, but I didn't want to stream music through the air (so much HASH!) All the UI does is direct the OS what to do. Lots of other benefits too, but that was the feature that got me interested. Glad to hear it's interested someone else!

Correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you were still planning on using a drive to play the DVD-As? If so, I would look into how well optical drives are supported for RuneAudio. I assume they would do okay, especially simple powered external drives. But it might be a hassle mounting each disk as you insert it. Since playback is bitperfect, I've just stuffed my library on a USB for sake of ease.

Fair warning, the 0.3 Beta was a big rework, and (as of this writing) some of the basic stuff got a bit buggy. You'll find on the forums that there is lots of hard work going on tracking the main issues down, and a great many of them are solved already. (Again, mine works like a song, but I don't have a complicated setup.) The main crew is planning on releasing an update soon that should iron out the main stuff. Probably by the time an Rpi and DAC ships...?

Cheers!
-Fishstix

[20to20]

Correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you were still planning on using a drive to play the DVD-As?
-Fishstix

I would use an external DVD drive with it. But instead of going through the additional step of creating DVD-A format discs from a .wav file I would just play my .wav files from a playlist, read from the DVD they would be archived to. DVD-A discs still need a player capable of reading the format so the Rpi RuneOS wouldn't work for that. I use a Panasonic DVD/DVD-A player for those. And an older Oppo "universal" player.

I'm familiar with Linux disc mounting and unmounting process. It's "usually" automatic... (sigh)... with ejection and loading, depending on the drive and distitribution... but not always dependable. Would have to try it but if it needed the additional mount/unmount step, that's not too onerous. Although I can see a disc by disc playlist would have to be imported and stored to be convenient for selecting playback since every new disc loading might not be seen as a new playlist immediately by the player UI. Can you swap your flash drives and see the contents immediately as a new source and playlist of files?

20

[Fishstix]

The Library system is built on MusicPlayerDaemon, which I was new to. It seems more an album-based system, and keeps a static list of what's in your library. Or it will, for now that function is disabled through development. Every time you reboot, the library rescans to see what you've got on your disks. There is a simple settings menu where you can force rescanning, and that works easily enough. For the time being (they might have fixed this recently) there are still issues with hot-swapping drives; Rune tends to hold onto mounts even when they have been removed, even across boots. I also recall this is a UI issue, rather than an OS fumble.

I've got all the requisite parts to test this, now that I think on it. I'll play with them over the weekend and see just how well they like to play together. The digital library is seamless for me, so I haven't been looking farther than that. But there's no reason not to test and mess around with it, it's a *development* board, right?

I'll get back to you...
-Fishstix

[Fishstix]

Hey 20,

I played with my RuneAudio box today and sorry to say, the results for DVD support is not promising. It mounted immediately and then dropped it, mounted and dropped, over and over and over again until I unplugged it. Interestingly, the current draw wasn't enough to brown out the board, even when the DVD was spinning up. Maybe there is hope. The RuneAudio guys have a thread open for Feature Suggestions on their forum, it could be worth posting a note. Some of those things are simple to add, some not. For myself, I finally burned all my CDs off a few years ago, and then boxed them up. Good for backup, and I have alot more space in my AV cabinet for vinyl now....

-Fishstix