Comments on: How to Network your Mac music system with the Raspberry Pi and HiFiBerry – Part 2

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Thu, 10 May 2018 14:55:29 +0000

Hi,
1. You don’t need it. However, USB from the Pi hasn’t always been that reliable (see notes in the USB DACs section above) – with that said, it does seem to have improved a lot – at least with the gear I have on hand – in the 2 1/2 years since I wrote this article. Right now I’m listening to an RPi 3B+ feeding a Topping NX4 DSD via USB and networked with Wifi.
2. You can do that if you want to but it doesn’t really help if you want to have centralized music storage and multiple Volumio/whatever destinations. IOW I don’t really think of that as a networked music system. Also, AFAIK you can’t stream Tidal that way. There’s definitely merit though in having a Pi run as the music server and there are a couple of later articles on that. However my preferred solution now is an ODroid HC1.

By: Mark Allen

Mark Allen — Fri, 04 May 2018 09:47:14 +0000

Two questions:
1) Why would you need the HifiBerry DIGI card at all if you are going to be using the USB output?
2) Why don’t you use the Pi itself as the music server? Just plug in a hard drive that contains your music files (or a USB memory stick) into one of the USB ports on the Pi and set up Volumio to use this as the music source (just make sure you are powering the Pi with a charger that provides more than 2 amps or your hard drive won’t work). Volumio will still allow you to stream from Internet music sources but it will take music files directly off the hard drive/USB memory stick.

By: Yannick MAHE

Yannick MAHE — Sat, 20 May 2017 07:43:15 +0000

For example, Qobuz and hi-res files make me try this solution…

But I would have preferred implantations with Volumio (for Qobuz streaming, and to mount my music server).

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 10:35:49 +0000

Hi Jan, do you have “Playlist” mode selected in Kinsky?

A better solution is actually in fact to use BubbleUPnPServer and Kazoo, as I described in the more recent article here: https://www.hifizine.com/2016/06/how-to-stream-tidal-to-the-raspberry-pi/ (you don’t have to do the Tidal part, it is still an improvement just for playing files from minimServer).

By: Jan Aukes

Jan Aukes — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 13:31:21 +0000

Hi John,

I followed your advises and my Hifiberry reads my iTunes files. But there is still one problem Kinsky makes playlists from an album, but playing stops after each track. In Volumio under Queue I only see the current track.
I have MinimServer 0.8.4. update 99
Kinsky for mac 4.4.5.0

I hope you have a solution!
Thanks
Jan Aukes

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 05:03:24 +0000

Hi, I’ve been using the Rpi3 as my pidisk (server) and haven’t tried it recently as the player with the HifiBerry card. I see there is a new release of volumio, I would guess that it works fine with the Rpi3 but haven’t tried it.

By: HMS_Doc

HMS_Doc — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 21:42:34 +0000

Any change in thoughts about using the newer Raspberry Pi 3?

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:41:44 +0000

Hi Danny, that is a really good question. It hits on a point that I haven’t explicated at all well in these articles. I had to think a bit to try and unravel my assumptions. As per the diagrams, there are several parts to a networked music system. You can group the things that work together and call them an “ecosystem.” The Apple music ecosystem consists of iTunes, Remote, and any player device that has Airplay on it, either officially or unofficially as in the case of Shairplay.

What I’ve been focusing on here is the “UPnP ecosystem.” MinimServer, the UPnP part of volumio (upmdpcli I believe), the various controller apps. This is a more “open” system that is a lot easier for anyone to be part of, including commercial streamers. It also allows higher sample rates (Apple’s Airplay is limited to 44.1 Hz), different controllers, different servers, different players, etc. In the next series of articles (first one just put up), I’m setting up a Raspberry Pi as the server so no computer is needed at all. But with all that open-ness comes some confusion (I found it confusing anyway), which is really why I thought I might try to provide a specific example of how to set up a system of this type.

There are more of these ecosystems. Commercial ones that I have zero knowledge of like Sonos and BlueSound. Squeezebox and Logitech media Server – there are Raspberry Pi distributions that support that, like picoreplayer and Max2Play. More recently, there is Roon, which seems to have rapidly evolved into much more than just “music metadata” and which I hope I will be able to write about in future articles.

So to answer your question, no, you don’t have to install the server software (MinimServer) or use other apps if you are happy with the Apple ecosystem. If you’d like to experiment with something else, however, this article is one approach. And yes, I should have thought about this more earlier and made it clearer 🙂 Thank you for the question.

By: John Reekie

John Reekie — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:21:01 +0000

Hi again Timothy, RuneAudio is running fine on the RPi 3 – http://www.runeaudio.com/download/

By: DannyBoyNYC

DannyBoyNYC — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 03:02:19 +0000

What I’m not entirely certain about here is the need for some of the additional server software. When I turn on Airplay Volumio shows up as a streaming device in iTunes and I use that (or the Remote App on my phone) to control the audio. Is the server really necessary?