You may be interested in my findings having recently purchased a Raspberry Pi after the suggestion that it would make a good choice for an alternative Squeezebox (and also a platform for XBMC). My intention was to use the RPi with my external USB card, an Amanero (as used by JackofAll) which connects to a Sabre 9018 DAC (a home build DIY effort).
FYI - I also own a Touch and a Boom and previously had a SB3 and I'm a big fan of SBS in general. I also have some experience with Linux, but am by no means an expert. Initially I tried out sbp's PiCoPlayer image as detailed here: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?97803-piCoPlayer-Squeezelite-on-Microcore-linux-An-embedded-OS-in-RAM-with-Squeezelite This was very easy to get working and initial results were promising playing out the on-board audio socket. After configuring it to make use of the Amanero via USB, results were not so good. I was getting lots of clicking and glitching in the audio, particularly during the first couple of seconds of each track - but the general sound quality seemed good when it played cleanly, so I tried persevering. However after trying lots of changes to the ALSA settings and a few system configuration options I could not get it to play 100% cleanly, so I thought I would try a different distribution. So next up was truehl's Squeezeplug image. Again this was an easy, but lengthier install. I kept the configuration simple and just installed Squeezelite as a player - no LMS or other services. Results were very similar to PicoPlayer, possibly a little better but still glitching most noticeably at start of tracks. Again tweaking ALSA / system settings made small benefit but not enough to make me happy! After leaving it aside for a few days I returned to the Pi convinced that it must be possible to get it to play nicely. It was clear that there was an issue related to network activity and USB audio, so I spent a couple of hours googling around and reading lots of posts, and lucked upon a post that suggested adding "smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N" to /boot/cmdline.txt, which should help stop the Ethernet driver grabbing all the USB bandwidth. Two minutes later and BINGO!!! It worked! Perfect playback. Tested with various sources ranging from MP3, 192-24 FLACs and internet radio station - all play back just fine and sound great. Tried the same setting on PiCoPlayer and that worked just as well. I've not done any thorough comparisons but sound quality seems on par with the Touch - so I'm now very happy indeed with the Pi. I've even installed LMS and had it streaming separate radio stations to the Boom, Touch and Pi simultaneously without any issue, and sync appears to work fine. YMMV but I can whole heartedly recommend the RPi - even if you do want to play Hi-Res. [Unfortunately XBMC is a different story - no ALSA support yet so no USB Audio] Cheers Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ slackhead's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13963 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97046 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
