Adventures with QOBUZ and my Raspberry Pi.

Whilst I am indulging in some streamed Yello, much to the annoyance of my 13 year old son, I thought I would share a solution to getting QOBUZ streaming through my UQ2 which works well for me and hope this may be useful to others. 

I have an extensive cd collection ripped to a windows 10 pc, together with hires downloads. These are all served up to my UQ2 using asset and I use the Naim app on my ipad. The way I had been accessing QOBUZ was by using BubbleUpnp server running on the PC and using Linn Kazoo app on my ipad (I also used the Lumin app but preferred Kazoo). This combination does work quite well. However, I found it quite clunky and had some odd behaviours, for example having to completely clear the playlists to prevent restarts once stopped. It also did not allow me to browse by genre etc. I was on the lookout for a better solution...

I had been looking around for something useful to do with a Raspberry pi 3, given to me by a dear friend for my last "significant" birthday. Reading threads on here made me think there could be a way to solve the problem. After a bit of reading I settled on a Hifiberry digi+ pro board for the pi and a nice case. Not sure if the "pro" version really makes a difference but it was not much more than standard.  I also got an ifi 5v low noise wall wart. It took me 5 minutes max to put it all together. I tried out the Max2play software image. This was very easy to set up but I settled on the PiCorePlayer which was equally as easy but runs from memory rather than the SD card (this is supposed to be easier on the SD card). The software turns the pi into a squeezebox. It can access a Logitech Media Server (LMS) on the network. I did not really want to set this up on the windows pc. Instead, the piCorePlayer allows this to be setup on the pi, as well as the squeezebox software. The LMS can access my music on the windows pc. However, this is not what I use it for. Instead, it has a great QOBUZ plugin that enables access to your QOBUZ account and streams to the squeezebox.

I connect the pi to the UQ2 using a basic Audioquest digital coax. I found this to sound better to my ears than using the optical Toslink output. There is also marked improvement when using the ifi power supply compared with the standard pi supply. The power supply is connected to the normal micro USB and I have made no modifications. I know that some have found improvements in bypassing some of the pi protection circuitry etc but I don't want to do that just yet. 

Now for the control app. You can control the squeezebox by directing a browser to the network address of the LMS. This is what I use when controlling with a windows device such as my surface. However, there are Android and Ios apps that can control very nicely. I have not tried the Android apps. For my ipad I have tried Ipeng 9 and Squeezepad. I much prefer Squeezepad. It is not as customisable as Ipeng but it is a fair bit slicker and extracts great artist and album info and links directly with web resources such as Discogs, last.fm and  Wikipedia.

I still directly stream my ripped cd collection and hires downloads via asset, as there is a definite sq advantage. However, as far as I can tell the QOBUZ streams through the pi are very close if not identical to those through the Bubbleupnp server. The big advantage of the pi solution is the significantly better control app which makes accessing QOBUZ a pleasure.  Maybe Naim could take a look at Squeezepad for ideas for improvements to the Naim app ;-)

I now have the access to QOBUZ that I wanted, with very good, toe tapping sq, and a great user experience being offered by the control app. Excluding the pi this has cost me about £110. Chuffed with that.

Sorry for this long post but hope this may give you some ideas!

Mark