I’ve been running my music system at home using Squeezebox Server software for many years. It has served me well, but Logitech bought the entire eco-system and then abandoned it. Because it’s Open Source, it’s still updated, but it’s time to do an upgrade to a better system. After testing a lot of different server solutions, I finally choose Roon by Roon Labs as my m
My current music setup is a Raspberry Pi 3 with a HifiBerry DAC+ audio card as my music player. It works perfectly, except for one annoying thing. The new HifiBerry DAC+ makes an audible click or poping sound when changing the sampling rate. I have a lot of recordings in higher resolution than CD-quality of 16-bit 44kHz, so it’s jarring when it happens. I like to play my music loud which exacerbates the problem. But there’s an easy solution, and at the same time, you can get better sound quality overall. Here’s how to fix the problem.
With the resurgence of good Hi-Fi, where more and more people buy good headphones and listen to a lot of music thanks to streaming, it’s sad to see the things the mastering engineers (and in the end the artist) do to music. The recordings are getting worse. Even old records that get the “Remastered” or “Expanded” treatment doesn’t sound as good as the original. Why?
So I gave Apple Music streaming a try. Being able to just search for music and add it to my playlists sounded like a good idea. After a while the recommendations becomes rather good as well, giving me some tips of other bands I might like. But here’s the problem I have with Apple Music. When you sync your music via iCloud, you can no longer sync music via iTunes! And to be able to download music locally from Apple Music to your phone, you must use the “in the iCloud” solution. Catch–22 anyone?
A lot of people are using the excellent Linux microcomputer Raspberry Pi and install it in their cars. Usually, they use a color screen that is touch sensitive, being able to play back video and music. But I’m only interested in high-quality audio playback, being able to have all my CDs in lossless FLAC format for optimal sound quality. So a 16×2 LCD with some buttons is plenty. I now have a working system (but not yet installed in my car.) here’s a description of how I’ve built it. Most of the installations I’ve seen the use of the audio out from the Raspberry Pi, but it’s only 11-bit and sounds like crap. I want to use an external DAC, and you can get that to work in XBMC, but only menu and music output, not films. There are some HDMI to audio converters, but I’ll instead use a quality USB DAC.