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Article: The Value Proposition In Computer Audio: Nuts, Bolts, and Building Blocks - Building a Home for Your Player Software


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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, LOL! It took me a whole day to get my Pi4 to make music via usb to my W4S re-clocker and finally to my Bryston BDA-2 DAC. But, I am now happily playing Mahler's 2nd. It took me that long because I did all kinds of things wrong and did them wrong at least three times, then changed my mind about the OS a few times, and on and on. But I am very happy with the result. The only question I have is, is ALSA as good as WASPI or ASIO or what-have-you. But that discussion would be for another thread. Just know that I got it to work, and am looking forward to the next installment detailing SBCs. Thank you once again!

 

John J

JJinPDX

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6 hours ago, bluesman said:

Congratulations and welcome to the club - you’re now an official Pi head!

 

PS: what OS and music management system did you finally use?

 

I ended up with Raspian Lite downloaded from the raspberrypi.org website. I'm using Roon, so the Pi is setup with Roon Bridge. 

 

5 hours ago, bluesman said:

PPS: Is your Pi the 1, 2 or 4 gig model?

 

RPi 4 Model B/4GB. Probably overkill just for Raspian Lite and the Roon Bridge, but I have it hooked up to the TV and will eventually load Kobi so I can play all my ripped DVD's that are stored on the NAS, along with my music. I must mention that where I have my system cannot be reached by ethernet or coax cabling, which irritates me no end. So everything is by wifi. I'm using the 5 GHz band and so far there have been no hiccups with this. The highest I can go with the Bryston is 24/192, but that plays with ease. I cannot do DSD, so have no experience over wifi with that. 

 

Again, thanks to you for your great substantive essays and all the others who make this amazing hobby so accessible and fun. 

 

John J

JJinPDX

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19 hours ago, bluesman said:

If you were unaware of it, there's a bug in the 4 gig Pi 4b that limits RAM access - we're not able to use the full 4 gigs with the current firmware.  This model also has intermittent USB problems that go away if you limit memory access to 3 gigs in one of the configuration files.  The development team is working on a fix, and I'm hopeful that it'll be available soon.  Roon drops and reconnects one of my two 4s running Bridge on Raspbian Buster over a roughly regular cycle of about 30 to 60 seconds - but I don't have this problem with Ropieee.  I'm about to try with DietPi and Bridge to see if it's peculiar to Raspbian.

 

I did not know about the memory limitation. I did try to expand the use of RAM to its max, and apparently it did. Using "free -h" I see that I'm at 3.8Gi, but only using 202Mi with 3.5Gi free. The unit has been playing now for over 6 hours with absolutely no hiccups at all. Bridge is the only thing it's doing; I haven't loaded Kodi yet. I've also unplugged its power supply and plugged it back in several times to see if it will boot back up and be usable. No problems there. For my simple needs, it appears to be the solution. 

 

I'm buying another and giving this one as a gift to an audiophile friend who has difficulty using a remote, so this will be perfect for him. The new one will have the flirc case. 

 

I'm also documenting every single step I used to get this up and to its current state, in case someone wants to avoid all the trial and error and just wants to have a printout handy that is specific for the RPi4 and Bridge. 

JJinPDX

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Ropieee. Ok. Will give it a try for the same grins and giggles. 

 

I have a flirc case on its way. 

 

The one thing I am now researching is how to automagically make sure the OS updates and protects itself without my having to do so myself, and how to make sure if there's a power outage that it can come back with no corruption. Since I'm going to install a few of these around the house to group using RAAT, I want it to be as much of an appliance as possible. 

 

This is great fun! 

 

John J

JJinPDX

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Ropieee is having trouble with USB 2.0 out to a Music Streamer II DAC I had laying around. Pops and clicks, although it did start out okay. Not sure why it suddenly started misbehaving. It recognizes the DAC through Roon just fine. Will re-flash the 4-gig SD that I put it on and try again. I will also report the issue to the Ropieee folks on Roon, but thought I'd let you know. Went back to the Raspian Lite and no problems at all. 

JJinPDX

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