Audiolinux Server configurations, Software, Hardware, and Listening Impressions

[davide256]

1 hour ago, mourip said:

 

I have been thinking about your reply ever since you wrote it. 

 

I would first like to say that I have switched out both of my Roon endpoints to run AL in ramroot with no internal disks. I was able to pull out 4 SSDs by doing this. I also have now obtained SQ that is on a level with my Dante based system, which is in my mind an excellent achievement. For me AL SQ is not only excellent on an absolute level but is is also huge bang-for-the buck.

 

Now to my point. It is obvious that your involvement with AS(CA) has really enlivened your efforts. It has hopefully also accelerated your business. You are extremely responsive to suggestions and requests, not to mention helping with issues that arise from those of us unfamiliar with Linux itself.

 

I have one issue with your reply above. When asked if the changes you made to allow cpu cores to be dedicated for audio processes would improve sound quality for reply was: 

 

                      "I am waiting for the results of user experimentation. I must find the time to listen myself... "

I find this a bit troubling. Usually audio application creators come up with a potential idea, test it, and then offer it to users as proven. In this case you seem to have come up with a theory that might improve sound quality and then offered it as "live" for users to test for you. For me the issue here is that most users will assume that if you put an idea into production it will have proven and tested merit. They may then spend time working with it and sorting out bugs when there has been no evidence that it will ever give benefit.

 

I think that it is safe to say that everyone here is primarily interested in improvements in sound quality. Many here may also enjoy the chase since AS has a lot of very inquisitive audiophiles and computer gurus. To be clear, I enjoy the chase and see this as new learning however it is also already clear to me that we are beta testers for Audiolinux. I accept that, however some users may be led down a trail of frustration and quit before ever finding out how good your product is.

 

I would like to suggest that you always have two versions of your software. One should be clearly labeled "beta" and the other will be your well vetted final product. Let subscribed users have both versions and ask for feedback. Currently all of your live products are really in beta. You are asking users to let YOU know if new ideas work or not and if they result in an improvement in SQ. 

 

I hope that you will see these comments as helpful. Keep up the excellent work.

 

Paul

@hifi25nl     As someone who had to deal with customer pain from "the law of unintended consequences" in software updates, I highly recommend that you also not move anything from beta status to production status without a reasonable standard bake in interval.  Issues can take time to rise to the top and sort out

from user problems vs software defect. Even bug fixes can cause more issues than they solve.

[davide256]

Curious what folks are using for media storage at NUC server end? SSD?

[davide256]

2 hours ago, lmitche said:

Checkout my post on page 520 on the "Novel" thread. Since then, there are further pages of dialog about ssds and hdds and ridicule by the inexperienced. LOL.

1 TB SSD has gotten to be pretty affordable, ~$150 vs adding a bigger (more costly) SDXC card to my Lexar USB3 stack. The question in my mind is whether an external USB3 enclosure would be better than putting it inside the NUC? Some sacrifice in access speed there but seems to me that independently powering the drive would be a good thing...

[davide256]

2 hours ago, bobfa said:

Looks nice but the spikes on the wood make me cringe!!

ahh the trouble you have go to in order to get the picture right... decent composition with good object separation, where the speaker is used for size and class emphasis. Without the  isolators, speaker and server would have visually "fused"

[davide256]

35 minutes ago, hifi25nl said:

Yes, Roon and HQPlayer are not caching the entire song to RAM, only a part of it

If you use MPD instead yes you can.

Obviously the configuration made on MPD has not relevance for other players.

 

I could make some tricks... change the name of MPD, create a new interface like Cantata, call it Audiolinux player, et voilà! I have a RAM player!

 

...Seriously I could arrange things so that some files in a specific folder of your music library (I guess many libraries are huge),  would automatically be loaded to RAM at boot, so that, if the folder is added in Roon or HQPlayer library configuration , they would play from RAM. Would this be convenient? I don't know. 

 

I think that users should ask that option to Roon and HQPlayer developers.

So a play list cache option is the trick needed from Roon / HQPlayer; allow you to select a drive directory for playlist to be copied to/overwrite before beginning play? Would require that you could define ~8GB  RAM or Optane partition for this use. That would nicely eliminate SQ impacts from physical media choice for storage.

[davide256]

 

56 minutes ago, ray-dude said:

Alas, Roon optimizes for multi-room, multi-stream playback. That would be challenging with in memory caching, but doable. I hope they cave in this, but they’ve been adamant that it is incompatible with what they consider a core feature in their system. 

 

If you use Squeezelite as your LMS end point, Roon Core does respect caching the current and next track to the end point. With Squeezelite and a large input buffer, I did a fun experiment where I queued up 2 long tracks, hit play on Roon, disconnected my end point from Ethernet, and it happily played music from RAM for 20+ minutes. 

hmm, could you do this locally with AL, have Roonserver send to LMS as endpoint on same box? Eliminate local media access during track playback of an album?

[davide256]

Would like to try wifi on 7PJYH endpoint but the instructions aren't getting me there

https://www.audio-linux.com/html/wifi.html

 

when I try these I get

 

[audiolinux@audiolinux ~]$ ip addr show

....
3: wlo2: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 20:16:b9:36:60:b4 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
[audiolinux@audiolinux ~]$ ip link set dev  wlo2 up
RTNETLINK answers: Operation not permitted
[audiolinux@audiolinux ~]$ touch /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlo2.conf
touch: cannot touch '/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlo2.conf': No such file or directory
[audiolinux@audiolinux ~]$

 

 

same using root

 

Suggestions?

[davide256]

1 hour ago, rickca said:

Did you install the wpa_supplicant package?

That step is MIA from the AL site wifi setup instructions. Help appreciated on how to get and install

[davide256]

25 minutes ago, lmitche said:

And did you substitute the device string in the website example with "wlo2"?

yes... thats visible in the earlier screen paste

[audiolinux@audiolinux ~]$ touch /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlo2.conf

[davide256]

39 minutes ago, hifi25nl said:

As root:

pacman -S wpa_supplicant

thanks. That addressed the two errors. However at reboot and check, all was gone... no surprise since this was done in RAM mode

and I forgot to RAMsave. May I suggest adding both to the instructions?

 

1)  run pacman -S wpa_supplicant

2) before reboot, if in RAM mode, execute RAM save from AL menu

 

will rinse and repeat, remembering to RAM save, hopefully in the home stretch now

[davide256]

On 4/4/2019 at 2:32 PM, davide256 said:

thanks. That addressed the two errors. However at reboot and check, all was gone... no surprise since this was done in RAM mode

and I forgot to RAMsave. May I suggest adding both to the instructions?

 

1)  run pacman -S wpa_supplicant

2) before reboot, if in RAM mode, execute RAM save from AL menu

 

will rinse and repeat, remembering to RAM save, hopefully in the home stretch now

@hifi25nl

 

 able to complete the instructions once I made sure to RAMsave after changes but was unable to connect.

 

I did find one error in the the instructions

using the "scan" command returned "XFINITY" as ssid.

After following the instructions through without success, I realized this  was a neighbors ssid .

 

Then edited the wpa_supplicant-wlo2.conf file to my ssid for 5g, ramsaved, rebooted, still no success

networkctl shows for wlo2 no carrier  configuring

 

two questions

1) how can I verify which SSID's the NUC does see

2) assuming it can see mine, what do I do at this point to get NUC wifi working?

[davide256]

2 hours ago, hifi25nl said:

I will try to make a summary of different configurations, in order of CPU load.

 

First the standard audiolinux kernel is now linux-rt-bfq without NUMA enabled. You can install it from menu as usual, even if the version number is the same.

This is because system performance is better in this case.

With NUMA disabled CUDA acceleration in HQPlayer will not work. You can install the one with NUMA enabled downloading the files from https://www.audio-linux.com/ftp/packages/kernel/last/linux-rt-bfq-numa/ Contact support if you have some doubt.

 

Ok, this is the sequence of configurations:

 

1) Extreme/Extreme2 boot + Extreme priority

2) Standard boot + Extreme priority

3) Standard boot + Standard priority

4) Standard boot + disabled manual priority assignment. This can be done as root with:

systemctl disable rtapp.timer

systemctl disable rtirq

 

If you have a powerful processor and a good cooling system option 1) could be the best but with weak processors I would try to scale down CPU utilization using the other options, for example using option 3)

If you have chosen to use a not powerful power supply because you think this choice is better for sound, you cannot use your system the same way as a 1000 Watt system...you should find the right balance between power and latency.

 

Please confirm is  the package without NUMA enabled "audiolinux mini 112" dated 3/27/19?

I prefer to do a fresh install as kernel upgrades do have a failure rate

[davide256]

15 minutes ago, BigAlMc said:

 

Ah so any possible limitation is on the NUCs BIOS rather than the software.

 

Cool. Thanks will look into it and perhaps give it a go.

 

Cheers,

Alan

I was originally booting AL from micro SDXC card on a USB multimedia stick, so should work. Suspect you would have to use Rufus to image the SDXC card, then adjust remaining partition space to full size for music storage.

 

[davide256]

Has anyone played around with the NUC i8XXX series yet as AL server? Thinking about buying an i5/i7 in this series, when I looked at the CPU benchmark stats

for the NUC i7XXX series, wasn't impressed vs my existing AMD FX-8330 server

[davide256]

30 minutes ago, lmitche said:

Looking at the NUC roadmap raises fears that the new machines won't run at the low tdp (current) levels we enjoy on the 7th generation NUCs today.

1) I suspect the NUC Celeron family is on its way out, given the lack of supply since December in 7 series

2) comparing the 7 series vs 8 series, the critical difference is switch from 2 cores to 4 cores, more speed but also more watts consumption.

 

On the server side, not so bad, an i7 needed a heftier power supply to begin with as server, something like an SR4 or JS-2 seemed mandatory, not sure that using

an i8 changes anything there other than an aftermarket (Akasa?) fanless case now seems required for full throated CPU use?

 

On the endpoint side, challenging as what I've read so far seems to suggest 7CJYH/7PJYH are a step along the way to 7i7xxx in low power mode with LPS 1.2?

Which raises the question of whether the i8xxx series can work in low power mode with the LPS 1.2?

 

 

 

 

[davide256]

Tough to keep track of the  latest, greatest config with AL/NUC, wondering if I've missed something important with

the configuration below?

 

1) on endpoint side I run

Bios: speed step off, low power mode, all peripherals other than USB disabled, wired Ethernet

AL: latest version with NUMA disabled, Roonbridge, realtime priority extreme, ethernet rate limited to 100, RAMroot

 

2) on server side I run

BIOS: speed step off, high power mode, all peripherals other than USB disabled, wired Ethernet

AL: latest version with NUMA disabled, Roonserver, realtime priority extreme, boot extreme, ethernet rate limited to 100, RAMroot

media USB3 connected with independent LPS power

 

got wifi working on the endpoint NUC7PJYH but wasn't impressed, still need to experiment with the server NUC 8i3BEH to see if it can do better.

Not impressed with dedicated audio cores so far.

 

Squeezelite for Roon endpoint sounds interesting but for some reason I could never see the endpoint when I enabled in Roonserver and AL menu,

wish there were a walkthrough of how to do this with the enhanced buffer settings?

 

[davide256]

6 minutes ago, lmitche said:

Try removing /var/roon/RAATServer/Settings/unique_id on one of the machines and restart.

use the copy feature to create a second USB stick that has different machine name as well (i.e.audiolinux2)

Removing the unique_id didn't solve the problem for me, using the copy feature from the menu did.

[davide256]

27 minutes ago, renan said:

 

 

Thnaks Lmitche and davide256,

 

I took the longer and easiest way , the copy feature" since I'm not having fun with command lines. It worked;

During the process it did twice write that it will suppress the unique-id and that it didn't find the unique-id.... but well this is working.

Thanks

What I observed was that DHCP would assign duplicate IP address if the host name was not changed

[davide256]

On 6/5/2019 at 5:14 PM, hifi25nl said:

Now it should be fixed

... 50% of the time I can't update headless, have to reinstall new image. The latest issue is after disabling RAMRoot, doing system/app/menu updates and

then trying to re-enable RAMroot I get UUID not found??

Configuration was pretty basic, Roon endpoint on headless, no extreme modes, copied using original USB stick menu to have

unique DNS/WINS name. Prior image dated from April. Tried RAMroot remove, still getting UUID not found when I try to enable.

 

Is there an easy way to change hostname at initial install vs install then copy? Maybe add a menu item for install,  "choose default hostname {Audiolinux}

or overwrite to proceed"

That would make fresh install less time consuming for a 2 NUC solution update

 

[davide256]

1 hour ago, dminches said:

Audiolinux newbee here.

 

If I want to run Roonserver on my PC under AL, which version of AL should I get?  If there is a guide on how to run Roonserver under AL I am fine reading and learning on my own.

 

Also, given that I have only worked with Windows OS before, will AL automatically recognize my jcat network and USB cards?  Is it basically plug and play under linux?

 

 

AL comes with Roonserver, you will usually have to update Roonserver the first time it runs. USB and wired Ethernet should be recognized during initial boot, if not contact Piero

for advice. Best to get your setup as you want it before trying RAM mode. The defaults for user prompt timeouts can make boot slow (~2 minutes) when running headless

[davide256]

5 minutes ago, dminches said:

Thanks. Is there a different version for headless than not?  I usually set things up with a monitor and keyboard and then go headless once it is running. 
 

From their site, I've used both headless and LXQT.  LXQT is a user friendly GUI for those like me who don't know Linux and find editing files in headless painful 😉

Audiolinux lxqt 1 year support with image            $ 59
Audiolinux headless 1 year support with image        $ 59
Audiolinux Raspberry 1 year support with image*      $ 59
Audiolinux lxqt unlimited time support               $ 119
Audiolinux headless unlimited time support           $ 119
Audiolinux all versions unlimited time support**     $ 219
Audiolinux USB stick/SD card with shipping           $ 119

[davide256]

15 hours ago, dminches said:

I am trying to get AL going but I am hitting a wall.

 

I created a USB drive with the version 420 image and booted into it.  AL is running off the USB.

 

What I want to do is created a bootable SSD so I am not booting to the USB.  I went through the AL guide but whatever command I am typing is not working.

 

Can someone tell me if I am going down the right path to creat the bootable SSD with AL?

 

TIA.

 

If you have a drive "toaster" its straight forward, just put the SSD in the external SATA drive adaptor and use your disk flash program to flash the SSD with AL instead of a USB stick.

AL may have a menu option but I haven't been down that path

Euphony after registration includes a system transfer option so that you can move from USB stick to SSD/Optane disk without losing your settings, have used that without problems.