I'm starting this thread so that there will be a separate place for those of us who are/want to be playing around with the Raspberry Pie computer for audio playback. I got my starter kit the other day and this thing is just way cool in how small it is and how much they got on this little card.
As Tom pointed out in the other linux thread, somebody has ported a version of voyage inux and MPD to the RP environment and seems to be makking good progress. Right now the one big limitation seems to be a firmware/lkernel issue related to the usb hardware and it seems the machine is limited to 16/44.1 playback (if I'm understanding things correctly), but the issue has been sent back to the Raspberry Pie Foundation and they have apparently hired an expert to deal with the issue, so this limitation appears to be temporary, but no fix date is given.
If you are into messing about with small computers, especially for audio use, you should get a starter kit, or stand-alone board and take this thing for a spin.
Another thing that really amazed me about this whole thing is that I actually, for the first time, have access to official documentation and related books through iBooks. Just for fun I typed "raspberry pie" in the iBooks search and the official RP user's guide came right up, so I downloaded it, opened iBooks, and sure enough, it was fully accessible (on my iPad) and I read through the entire 460 page manual in a day or two. That in itself was pretty impressive from my point of view, but reading about all the things that comes with the RP and the things people have done with it, the alternative OS builds for it (including a full function media player build), are quite impressive, plus lots of add-on boards and prototyping boards, bridges to arduino boards, etc. was also fascinating.
This little board with a good linear psu, an ethernet connection to a NAS (or usb drive/thumb drive) and a usb dac should prove to be a really sweet, tiny, even portable music server, with remote control possibilities for all kinds of smartphones, iPods, tablets, etc., or if one is really ambitious, a small display screen and some front panel buttons to control it (at this point, it looks like that would all have to be custom built/programmed.)
At $45 for a Rev B board (512 mb ram, 2 usb ports, ethernet port, HDMI port, composite video, 3.5mm stereo audio jack, and i/o connector., it's almost a no-brainer -- if you're into this sort of thing.
Be prepared to do some learning and lots of experimentation and the challenge/frustration of ongoing development though as this is hardly at the point of being a turnkey music streamer at this point. If you want that, the PCEngines Alix boards are a far more developed, proven and reliable solution, with plenty of online tutorials on how to get them running, and witha good linear power supply, can sound very, very good.
Anybody aside from Tom and I going to get on board with this? It would be nice if we could get a critical mass of bottleheads working on this, especially if it can be made to be a low cost, reliable server solution to feed the upcoming BH dac.
Cool stuff!
-- Jim
As Tom pointed out in the other linux thread, somebody has ported a version of voyage inux and MPD to the RP environment and seems to be makking good progress. Right now the one big limitation seems to be a firmware/lkernel issue related to the usb hardware and it seems the machine is limited to 16/44.1 playback (if I'm understanding things correctly), but the issue has been sent back to the Raspberry Pie Foundation and they have apparently hired an expert to deal with the issue, so this limitation appears to be temporary, but no fix date is given.
If you are into messing about with small computers, especially for audio use, you should get a starter kit, or stand-alone board and take this thing for a spin.
Another thing that really amazed me about this whole thing is that I actually, for the first time, have access to official documentation and related books through iBooks. Just for fun I typed "raspberry pie" in the iBooks search and the official RP user's guide came right up, so I downloaded it, opened iBooks, and sure enough, it was fully accessible (on my iPad) and I read through the entire 460 page manual in a day or two. That in itself was pretty impressive from my point of view, but reading about all the things that comes with the RP and the things people have done with it, the alternative OS builds for it (including a full function media player build), are quite impressive, plus lots of add-on boards and prototyping boards, bridges to arduino boards, etc. was also fascinating.
This little board with a good linear psu, an ethernet connection to a NAS (or usb drive/thumb drive) and a usb dac should prove to be a really sweet, tiny, even portable music server, with remote control possibilities for all kinds of smartphones, iPods, tablets, etc., or if one is really ambitious, a small display screen and some front panel buttons to control it (at this point, it looks like that would all have to be custom built/programmed.)
At $45 for a Rev B board (512 mb ram, 2 usb ports, ethernet port, HDMI port, composite video, 3.5mm stereo audio jack, and i/o connector., it's almost a no-brainer -- if you're into this sort of thing.
Be prepared to do some learning and lots of experimentation and the challenge/frustration of ongoing development though as this is hardly at the point of being a turnkey music streamer at this point. If you want that, the PCEngines Alix boards are a far more developed, proven and reliable solution, with plenty of online tutorials on how to get them running, and witha good linear power supply, can sound very, very good.
Anybody aside from Tom and I going to get on board with this? It would be nice if we could get a critical mass of bottleheads working on this, especially if it can be made to be a low cost, reliable server solution to feed the upcoming BH dac.
Cool stuff!
-- Jim
I did mention that with the RP you could use an HDMI to spdif converter for the BH dac and others, like Brad's that he just mentioned, that don't have a usb option, or won't go to full resolution with usb. Again, this is not tested, just theoretically possible with the RP with it's HDMI port.
