Raspberry Pi serving USB DAC - how to stream Audirvana and Roon

[yacob]

I am somewhat overwhelmed with the technicalities and was wondering if the more experienced and knowledgeable users could help me out.

 

• All my music (FLACs up to 192kHz, and DSD up to DSD128) is stored on the internal hard disk of an iMac.
• I have a Qobuz Sublime subscription. I do not care about Tidal. 
• On iMac I run Audirvana (i stream Qobuz from within Audirvana), and also have Roon installed for navigating my 1500 local albums (Roon does not support Qobuz streaming).
• iMac is connected with an USB cable to a USB DAC (Oppo HA1). 

 

Reading gazillions of posts saying that a general-purpose computer (e.g. my Imac) should be avoided for serving the music directly to a USB DAC because of electromagnetic noise, 'dirty' power, hundreds of CPU threads running at the same time and whatnot, I started suffering from Audiophilia neurosa  I wanted to insert a dedicated streaming device into my chain to separate the CPU-heavy workload of the iMac from serving the music to the USB DAC. 

 

I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 which is connected via Ethernet cable to the router. Instead of iMac being connected directly to USB DAC, the USB cable is now connecting Raspberry Pi (RPi for short) and USB DAC. So anything that iMac 'sends out' now goes via router and Ethernet cable to RPi which feeds the UBS DAC. 

 

The RPi that I have is the basic barebone version, I do not need any additional electronics (e.g. HifiBerry Dac) to convert it into a DAC or Amp, since I already have a dedicated DAC/Amp. 

 

On RPi I installed RoPieee software which is a RoonBridge software that enables RPi to be recognized as a Roon endpoint.  So far so good, Roon on the iMac sees the USB DAC connected to Ropieee-RPi as an output device, and streaming of my locally stored music runs smoothly and the Roon signal path indicates 'lossless' .

 

However, if i quit Roon on the iMac and start Audirvana, e.g. to play Qobuz, Audirvana (version 3.2.5) does not see RPi as a device.

 

Since I would prefer to stick with RPi as streamer and do not want to invest in microrendu, ultrarendu etc.:

 

1. Is there any RPi software that I should install instead of Ropieee that will enable RoonBridge but also allow the RPi to be recognized by Audirvana? Of course, it would be either Roon or Audirvana running on IMac, not both at the same time.
2. If there is no such software to serve both, is there at least a RPi software that will enable Audirvana on iMac to see RPi as a device? In this case I would of course lose the Roon functionality.

 

I would appreciate your critical thoughts whether my newbie logic above makes sense at all.

 

[yacob]

3 hours ago, eclectic said:

Use Dietpi. It has a dlna renderer and RoonBridge and can also work with Spotify Connect.

dietpi.com

 

 

Success! Thank you, @eclectic, for pointing me in the direction of DietPi. 

 

I replaced Ropieee with DietPi, installed 2 pieces of optional software (RoonBridge and Gmediarender), in dietpi-config menu i went into audio options and  changed the soundcard to "usb-dac"... and I was good to go!

 

Both Roon and Audirvana can now see Raspberry Pi with the attached USB DAC.

 

3 hours ago, jcn3 said:

Not sure why you would need both Audirvana and Roon, though. Stick with one or the other, imo.

 

Agreed, i would love to use only Roon! However, I am using Qobuz for music discovery and as long Qobuz does not want to work with Roon in allowing their catalog to be included in Roon, I continue streaming Qobuz via Audirvana.