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
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.
When setting up a Raspberry Pi with SqueezePlug, my favorite distribution for setting up a music server I always get the error message “avahi-daemon disabled because there is a unicast .local domain” because I have a lot of Apple equipment configured with Bonjour. To fix it, all you need to do is to edit /etc/default/avahi-daemon and change the line:
AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL=1
to
AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL=0
then restart the Avahi-daemon with
sudo service avahi-daemon restart
Problem solved.
I love my music playback setup that consists of a couple of Squeezebox V3 players in different rooms so I can listen to music in lossless format wherever I am in the apartment. With the iPeng HD app on my iPad, I have a nice interface for controlling the players with album art and other nice features. But the best part is that I can playback high resolution audio directly on my iPad using the Camera Kit USB adapter and an HRT HeadStreamer DAC portable USB headphone amplifier. But I wanted a small, cheap and eco-friendly server for hosting my music files and wondered if I could use the Raspberry Pi. And here’s my findings.