Raspberry Pi anyone?

Your profile enumerated a Squeezebox Touch…wh'appen?

I was just pondering the same!

If the objective is to replace the Vortexbox then a Raspberry PI running Asset works really well.  I use mine with mounted shares onto a Netgear ReadyNas but a USB drive attached to the Pi should suffice.

It works really well and so far I have not had any glitches.  Only cost be about £35!

Richard

Hi there,

The squeezebox touch is still in the mix and serving up spotify nicely. I also used it to stream from the Vortexbox. Would I be able to use this as an alternative to the RPI / Cubox? I seem to remember that it was very picky as to which hard drive would work with it. Would it be the case of just adding a NAS drive? I'm also a bit worried about it's future proofness

Cheers,

Robert

use a Raspberry Pi running Asset here with two NAS's mounted. I set for FLAC/ALAC  to WAV transcoding.

Simon

New Raspberry Pi B+ out today, same price. 4 USB, metal micro SD slot, combi audio/videos socket, upgraded PSU and more pins on the I/O socketty thing.

I don't have the inclination to get that deeply involved in tech, but would love for my kids to get into this.

I am currently running a bit of a hotchpotch system with a view to future upgrades.

Raspberry Pi with HiFi Berry DAC

NAC 32

SNAPS

NAP 140

Tannoy Mercury M2 speakers

I am running a bit of software called Pete Manchester Media player (Google it) which basically gives you a upnp compliant music player.  

I am controlling this from an Android tablet using BubbleUPnP, it also works fine with Kinsky but I like the search functionality in Bubble and accessing mostly CD FLAC rips on my NAS.  It is quite happy with 192/24 but I am not sure the quality difference is perceivable. It is worth noting that this setup plays gapless

The only thing I have to compare the Raspberry Pi to as source is a Marantz MCR 603 which is heading towards the door. I am not great with terminology but the Naim Pi set up sounds less detailed than the Marantz on its own or as a source for the Naim but there are a couple of recordings that I found unbearable with the Marantz that I can now listen to.

Obviously for £50 + a bit of solder it’s not going to be brilliant but I am quite happy to live with it for whilst I wait a for a capital scheme for something better, that’ll be after I have agreed a price and paid for the amps, had them serviced and got some suitable speakers or perhaps that’s not the right order?

Bottom line is that I still want to listen and I enjoy the music and it’s particularly nice to have Abbey Road and DSOM back without the gaps.

As you have got an existing DAC you might want to look at the HiFi Berry digi which gives you optical and spdif output. I have read the pi struggles with streaming through USB but perhaps this will improve with the B+?

I stream from my Pi via the Ethernet port using Asset and it works faultlessly up to 192/24 FLAC to WAV.

Hi Simon,

I thought asset was a upnp server, how do you have it configured, i.e. what is connected to what to use it as a source? Are you music files( FLAC or whatever) on a NAS or a USB HDD.  Am I missing something here

I too use the Raspberry Pi running Asset UPnP server to serve music files from mounted NAS to my ND5XS streamer, with n-Stream on iOS as the control point. It works great without any issue with all resolutions. I transcode FLAC, ALAC and even MP3 to WAV.

If you don't have a streamer front-end and just a DAC, you could try the HIFI Berry DIGI board (http://www.hifiberry.com/hbdigii)which provides a high-quality S/PDIF output board for the Raspberry Pi. This is then connected to your existing DAC and could use USB disks connected directly to the RPi. It even has the option of full galvanic isolation of the digital output.

You then could use a UPnP Control application (such as Asset Control) to control the UPnP server as to which file is served.

Alternatively HIFI Berry have a DAC board (http://www.hifiberry.com/dacc)that mounts on to the RPi and outputs line-level audio into an Pre-Amp/Integrated, as a full Streamer/Server configuration.

Now it looks like there is some configuration required in the RPi for both these boards, but you wanted a low-cost streamer/server option, it may be worth the time.

Simon.

Hi Lunicycle, yes Asset is a DLNA/UPnP Server, and I use to stream media from my Pi to my Naim network player under the control of Nstream. I simply mount the NAS file systems containing the CD rips to the Raspberry Pi via the Ethernet LAN.

Seems to work well with my 1400 or so and growing collection of CDs.

Simon

Hi Simon-in-Suffolk , That makes sense, just out of curiosity what advantage does that give you over accessing your NAS, which presumably has some form of media server available, directly from the streamer? And a secondary question to simes_pep why are you transcoding  to WAV as the ND5XS handles all those formats?

Hi Lunicycle,

Why a dedicated UPnP server running on Raspberry Pi? Firstly, my initial NAS is a ReadyNAS Duo, which despite being given a 1MB RAM upgrade was quite underpowered, so running when a Media Server it was slow to respond to the streamer and the Control point application on the iPad.

So this was much better when I introduced the Raspberry Pi as a dedicated UPnP server, performing the management of the music files and serving these to the streamer and control point. This means that the NAS unit is just acting as Network Storage. I have now upgraded my NAS to a ReadyNAS Ultra 2+ with 2GB RAM, but this was to be able to use 4TB disks, as the Duo max'ed at 2TB. Now displaying all Album view is undertaken in seconds (circa 1700 albums), in fact displaying all tracks with artwork (circa 22,000 tracks) is still under a minute.

Secondly the only Media Server applications available for the ReadyNAS range are ReadyDLNA, Logitech LMS and Twonky Server. I was using LMS on the Duo serving a Squeezebox SB3 for a number of years (but this was only up to a max of 24/48), I tried a SB Touch, before moving to a ND5XS :-)

I tried ReadyDLNA, but this didn't handle Album Artwork very well. So I ran Twonky for a while.

However Asset UPnP server is so much better, in terms of how it handles Albums, Album Artwork, Compilations, etc.

Plus Asset allows you to dynamically transcode formats, so the files are stored in compressed Lossless formats (FLAC/ALAC), with all the Metadata, but then uncompressed on-the-fly and served to the NAIM streamer as WAV. The playback of WAV is recommended by NAIM, with the reason given that playing WAV requires less processing in the streamer, and therefore reduces the electrical draw from the Power Supply which results in a lower noise floor in the streamer.

After testing, there is an improvement in playing WAV.

Hope this helps.

Simon

Most helpful thank you, I may try setting one of my Pis to run Asset on the basis of your comments and see how it performs. I use Twonky at the moment.

Wow - noticeably quicker and artwork rendered properly and chances are that if it sounds better with your system transcoded to wav it will with my very modest renderer but I I will listen.  I have turned on the replaygain and this should save jumping out my chair to the volume knob on my vintage amp - any view on SQ using replay gain.  I was already impressed with Spoon's ripping software and now I am an instant convert to this - and that improvement is whilst it is still scanning my library on an original 256MB pi. I can see an order for a Model B+ very soon!

SQ with replaygain, as long as you enable 24 bit with the replaygain in Asset and your source is 16 bit, then there should be no sound degradation as 24 bit gives lots more room to scale the volume down digitally.

Hi Lunicycle,

Good isn't it?

Now, if you are running your RPi 'headless' you can give the CPU more memory over the GPU (as you aren't outputting to a monitor) and also I overclocked the RPi to the full 'Turbo' setting. Heat is not really an issue in Ireland, even today with an outside temp of 22.6, the RPi is currently stable at around 43.3.

During the Beta program, beginning of the year, I put together a Configuration Guide, which is available from my Dropbox at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bu8...AlpNbXPbXFIT2uato_Ha 

Which may have some further guidance on configuration, installing iStat, overclocking, monitoring temp and my customized views for n-Stream.

Simon

Simon, Yes running RPi headless, it is sitting next to router with 5cm ethernet, and accessing with Putty.  Will have a look at your guide as soon as I get time, thanks again.

Hi, the NAS's I use can't run Asset. I have always used Asset and I like its features and works well with Naim.

Also when I was using my NDX/NDAC/555PS I preferred the sound when streaming from my Pi as opposed to using a HP PC.. I suspect it was down to the TCP windowing parameters used and the work done by the NDX when receiving the streams.

i have yet to check that this is still preferable when using the NDX/Hugo.

Simon 

Just back from my hols. Listening to Brian Wilson's SMiLE I discovered that transcoding to WAV seems to re-introduce gaps.  At first I thought that this may be related to the fact that this is 24bit (HDCD ripped with dbpoweramp) but it did the same with Abbey Road so I switched FLAC back to "as is" and the gaps were gone.  Does anyone know if this is what Asset does or could it be something to do with me running it on an original RPi with only 256MB? 

On the topic of RPi renderers. Volumio gets very good reports but I haven't tried it. I don't not believe it is upnp compliant and so cannot be controlled from the tablet of your choice with things like Bubble and Kinsky. My preference is to keep media server and renderer duties split that way I can still access music on things like my Roberts 83i in the kitchen.  I am currently experimenting with different rendering clients for RPi, the one I am using is detailed here 

https://github.com/PeteManches...Install-Raspberry-Pi

 and I have just come across this

http://blog.scphillips.com/201...ng-upnp-and-dlna-v3/

 which looks promising once I have retrieved the SD card I bought for the purpose from emergency camera duties. 

Oh and just noticed that Hifiberry are planning a DAC to fit RPi B+, this means no soldering so I would hang on for that, especially if you plan on hanging USB drives directly off it as there are now 4 USB sockets and the power management is improved.

No problem transcoding FLAC or ALAC to WAV up to 192/24 on the original Pi with Asset using Ethernet network shares.

if you have problems you can look into the Pi to see why. At 192/24 the Pi starts to be IO limited rather than CPU limited, but work fine, no problems what so ever, and is one of the best sounding stream servers I have come across.

Simon

It could be an issue with mounted drive from my NAS then, I will try copying something to RPi and see if that solves it. If it does then I will have start tweaking the mounting setting. Of course I could try turning off and turning it back on again first! 

If it helps this is the line in /etc/fstab on my Pi

//10.0.1.25/Music       /home/pi/nas cifs guest,_netdev,sec=ntlm 0 0     

My NAS containing my music for my Naim is on 10.0.1.25. I access as guest as I need only read only access for the Pi, and it keeps setup simple.