Volumio

volumio

Microcenter has Raspberry Pi Model B on sale for $30 so I picked one up for the basement. I have the HiFiBerry DAC on order, but wanted to try out a few of the other distros for the RPi. Volumio, formerly known as RaspyFi , bills itself as “a truly new listening experience”. It’s an optimized OS for audio quality, probably not too high on security, but offers support for the HiFiBerry’s I2S data path. Any browser on the local network can access it’s minimal web interface, but since it runs MPD, pretty much any MPC client can control it.

Downloaded the image, connected the RPi via ethernet, and most importantly, plugged in an old Xitel AN-1 DAC that I’m really happy to have found. Not sure why, but Volumio doesn’t use the analog audio output on the RPi. Anyway, up and running, I setup a mount to my music on a NAS drive, waited for it to update mpd’s database, rebooted, and bingo, it all works.

Purpose-built for turning your RPi into an audio player (though conspicuously absent on the details), the ui is the biggest drawback from for Volumio. Too much mouse movement, too much clicking. However the sound quality was fantastic.

Other notes: The timezone was off, ntp could’nt get it right. Here’s how to fix it:
sudo rm /etc/localtime
sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Tokyo /etc/localtime
Still can’t Wifi going, will try with another distro to make sure it isn’t the usb mini.

Advertisement