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My experience with player SW


al2813

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I started writing this in previous threads that got me into this topic but at the end decided to open a new one. I think the journey I am describing below is one that a lot of novices like me arriving in this and other forums go through. 

 

I started my journey into the Raspberry pi player world about 5 months ago. The corona lockdown probably had a lot to do with it. Instead of travelling every week for work I suddenly had time to build a new setup and tweak to death trying to get a better sound.... I tried several players outside the Pi world - BluOS, Audirvana to name a couple. I ended up with Roon and fell in love with the interface and information Roon provides around the music you listen to. In parallel, I started building up my own digital music library (had also time to Rip CDs and acquiring digital music in hi-res, especially discovered DSD). Once I selected Roon, I started looking for players. I realized the Raspebrry Pi is a great platform, started playing with that. This also allowed me to test volumio, but again ended up with Roon and signing up now for full subscription. I setup my first pi player with Ropieee and configured it as a Roon Bridge.  At that moment I thought Roon also had the best possible sound quality, so I started looking again on the HW side. Once I bought my first proper USB DAC, I started thinking of other HW. I posted here thinking that maybe I should get a tube pre amp as a way to open up the sound and get more depth.  then someone pointed me towards the possibility to try other players instead: 

So next step install Gentooplayer which i did. Following the discussion on the dedicated Gentooplayer thread, I also tested using Gentooplayer as a squeezelight renderer and configure squeezbox on Roon 

 

Indeed the squeezelight R2 option in Gentooplayer gave me the best results by far. I achieved the improvement I was looking for by simply changing the player. 

2 months later, i went back to some HW investment. I bought a new amp, I added an Allo USBridge Signature plus improved my cabling. I was getting closer to the sound I was looking for. 

 

Yesterday I installed Moodeaudio. Here again I tried both Squeezelight and Roonbridge. Unlike in Gentooplayer I could not get them to live side by side so that I can switch between them in Roon Remote and test. For now I can only use squeezelight and in order to use Roonbridge I need to disable Squeezelight (I am still investigating this and other twaeking issues I have and will solve them i hope). Moodeaudio is - in my setup - bettering Gentooplayer. In Squeezlight mode (again much better sound then in Roonbridge mode) Roon and mysetup are now sounding very close to where I wanted to get when I started. Amazing separation, more depth, more air between the instruments. 

 

This got me to another thought. I realize that now I am using Roon, but not using RAAT. I use Roon as LMS (with limitations becuase Roon supports this mode in a very partial way). I still adore the interface, the combination of my own library with Qobuz etc, but am starting to think maybe i need to explore alternatives outside of Roon? Would love to hear more thoughts, experiences. 

 

 

 

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Thanks to both. I still need to play with this a bit more. The difference is in sound quality (and this is very audible) between Moode running in Squeezelite mode with Roon with Squeezbox support turned on (a scenario not supported by Roon) and the variants I tried before is still amazing me. 

 

I will definitely try with another LMS instant (will set it up on my NAS), as well as with piCoreplayer. One thing is that I am too hooked to the user experience of Roon. Also need to check the Qobuz integration in LMS. 

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On 9/8/2020 at 5:04 AM, seeteeyou said:

FYI - here's piCorePlayer 6.1.0 (Raspberry Pi 4 only) with some tweaks added for selecting either Kernel Frequency as shown below, 9600 Hz / 8820 Hz for playing files with multiples of 48 kHz / 44.1 kHz respectively

 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sam0402/pcp-8820hz/master/pcp610-88_96Hz.z01

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sam0402/pcp-8820hz/master/pcp610-88_96Hz.z02

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sam0402/pcp-8820hz/master/pcp610-88_96Hz.zip

oA9XlZ5.png

 

How-to burn piCorePlayer onto a SD card

https://www.picoreplayer.org/how_to_burn_pcp_onto_a_sd_card.shtml

 

Settings

https://github.com/sam0402/pcp-8820hz/tree/master/setting

 

Other tweaks for squeezelite

https://soundcheck-audio.blogspot.com/p/the-engine.html

 

Weekend so have time to start the experiment. I will setup 2 instance of PiCorePlayer one for an LMS server - I assume there a standard setup will be sufficient. For the player, I have an Allo USBridge Signature and there I assume cannot use your tweaked version as USBridge Sig uses a Rpi 3+ CM. 

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Just now, al2813 said:

 

Weekend so have time to start the experiment. I will setup 2 instance of PiCorePlayer one for an LMS server - I assume there a standard setup will be sufficient. For the player, I have an Allo USBridge Signature and there I assume cannot use your tweaked version as USBridge Sig uses a Rpi 3+ CM? 

 

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I am running now PiCoreplayer 6.1.0 on the USBrudge Signature and works great. Sound quality fantastic but for now I still use Roon as the server. Today I will attack the server side again and see how it works. I see it difficult to be able to get anything close to Roon user interface and integration. Let's see. 

 

 

 

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So I got all to work. Some errors fixing and playing around and I had an LMS server running on my little RPI4. There's no doubt that LMS delivers great results being a free platform. Although Album and Artist info plugin is running I think I still don't have correctly setup as the info I get is poor compared to what I see in the screenshots provided in other posts. However bottom line is that even if get everything to work I still don't get the Roon user experience. I also think the sound quality is ever so thinner although I cannot really AB  - I can only play a bunch of songs from Roon and then swap servers and reboot the client, takes too long. So back to Roon - for now. Still have 8 months of subscription to think about this 🙂 

 

 

 

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