7 ms·

Not my project but I've been using it for a year on 3 Raspberry Pi and it has been rock solid. I highly recommend it. The synchronization is perfect and it only

Not my project but I've been using it for a year on 3 Raspberry Pi and it has been rock solid. I highly recommend it. The synchronization is perfect and it only adds a small delay (500ms max) to the music. I've configured Librespot to use this as a Spotify Play speaker and control it from the desktop or mobile Spotify app.

zer00eyz 7y ago
Do you have the PIs hooked to amps? If so what are you doing for volume control?
Havoc 7y ago
Worth pointing out that the raspberry audio out has quite a bad rep quality wise: http://raspberrypimaker.com/cheap-quality-audio-raspberry-pi/ http://raspberrypimaker.com/cheap-quality-audio-raspberry-pi...
- trynewideas 7y ago
  Pimoroni has a line of £20 hats that help solve that: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pirate-audio https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pirate-audio
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    I bought a couple, they're really good, my only dislike is that the screen software is written as a Mopidy plugin, but I'd prefer a remote mopidy instance and the pis and hats are just clients with controls.
    - 7839284023 7y ago
      Did you find a solution to the remote mopidy instance yet? I'd like to do the same thing.
- mbreese 7y ago
  I ended up using a (cheap) USB DAC to get around the RPi’s onboard audio. It’s a bit cheaper than a HAT, but can be hit or miss for compatibility.
  - mongol 7y ago
    For snapclient, I used a USB DAC at first, but turning it off and then on meant that snapclient lost its connection. I could not resolve that so I purchased a DAC HAT instead.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  I assume this is only for the analog output, right? Obviously if you're just using a cheap or old amp it won't have HDMI, but if you're amping with an A/V receiver you can just use the HDMI out and get perfectly good quality.
- kingosticks 7y ago
  It was really bad when launched, but to call it really bad now (or in 2018) is not fair. A lot of poeple waste their money on these hats when they don't need to.
  - ghostpepper 7y ago
    Has the hardware improved or just software? I have a DAC-Hat and it definitely picks up some sort of digital noise from the pi. I can literally hear SSH when large amounts of text are being dumped across the wire.
    - kingosticks 7y ago
      The Pi 1 B+ was improved with a dedicated power supply and I think that might have been it on the hardware side. The big improvement came with the software, details of which are linked elsewhere in this thread.
- akeck 7y ago
  Pi native audio has gotten a bit better. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=195178 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=195178
fyfy18 7y ago
500ms sounds like quite a lot. What causes the latency and are there any improvements that can be done to improve it?
- t34543 7y ago
  My use case for whole home audio is to play audio of a sports game that’s playing on TV in the living room. 500ms of latency is far too much. Even Sonos suffers from this with port/connect
  - mbreese 7y ago
    Isn’t this a case where you delay the video on the TV side to match the latency of the audio? I assume your TV has an option for audio delay. The problem that I’d see is that you probably don’t have this setup all the time, so switching your TV back and forth for an audio delay would be annoying. That and 500 ms might be more of a delay than your TV can handle.
    - t34543 7y ago
      Audio source is my receiver which does not offer this functionality. You’re right, config management will be painful. Receiver runs Linux and I did get a shell on it, but to be honest this is something I would rather just pay for. I don’t want to risk bricking it.
      - ghostpepper 7y ago
        I'm curious which receiver(s) run Linux
        t34543 7y ago
        Emotiva XMC-1
        wolrah 7y ago
        The majority of receivers above a certain point have streaming radio, "cast", and/or "smart TV" features. Just like so much of the rest of the appliance world, most of those are powered by some random ARM or MIPS SoC running some flavor of Linux. A modern networked AV receiver is sort of analogous to a managed switch, there's a fairly generic CPU running a general purpose OS presenting the user-facing interfaces, managing configuration, and handling some housekeeping tasks, then there's specialized hardware that actually deals with the signals and does the real heavy lifting after being set up by the general purpose processor..
vinw 7y ago
I couldn't get Librespot to work, will have to give it another go. What I ended up doing was running the Spotify desktop app, sinking it to the snapcast pipe via pulseaudio.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  I don't think librespot is maintained anymore. If you try again, maybe give spotifyd a shot. It works well for me in a basic setup (not using Snapcast) edit: forgot link https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd
  - kingosticks 7y ago
    It is maintained at https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot I don't know why the original author never merged the PRs pointing to the new repo.

zer00eyz 7y ago

Do you have the PIs hooked to amps? If so what are you doing for volume control?

Havoc 7y ago

Worth pointing out that the raspberry audio out has quite a bad rep quality wise: http://raspberrypimaker.com/cheap-quality-audio-raspberry-pi/ http://raspberrypimaker.com/cheap-quality-audio-raspberry-pi...

trynewideas 7y ago
Pimoroni has a line of £20 hats that help solve that: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pirate-audio https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pirate-audio
- alias_neo 7y ago
  I bought a couple, they're really good, my only dislike is that the screen software is written as a Mopidy plugin, but I'd prefer a remote mopidy instance and the pis and hats are just clients with controls.
  - 7839284023 7y ago
    Did you find a solution to the remote mopidy instance yet? I'd like to do the same thing.
mbreese 7y ago
I ended up using a (cheap) USB DAC to get around the RPi’s onboard audio. It’s a bit cheaper than a HAT, but can be hit or miss for compatibility.
- mongol 7y ago
  For snapclient, I used a USB DAC at first, but turning it off and then on meant that snapclient lost its connection. I could not resolve that so I purchased a DAC HAT instead.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
I assume this is only for the analog output, right? Obviously if you're just using a cheap or old amp it won't have HDMI, but if you're amping with an A/V receiver you can just use the HDMI out and get perfectly good quality.
kingosticks 7y ago
It was really bad when launched, but to call it really bad now (or in 2018) is not fair. A lot of poeple waste their money on these hats when they don't need to.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  Has the hardware improved or just software? I have a DAC-Hat and it definitely picks up some sort of digital noise from the pi. I can literally hear SSH when large amounts of text are being dumped across the wire.
  - kingosticks 7y ago
    The Pi 1 B+ was improved with a dedicated power supply and I think that might have been it on the hardware side. The big improvement came with the software, details of which are linked elsewhere in this thread.
akeck 7y ago
Pi native audio has gotten a bit better. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=195178 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=195178

fyfy18 7y ago

500ms sounds like quite a lot. What causes the latency and are there any improvements that can be done to improve it?

t34543 7y ago
My use case for whole home audio is to play audio of a sports game that’s playing on TV in the living room. 500ms of latency is far too much. Even Sonos suffers from this with port/connect
- mbreese 7y ago
  Isn’t this a case where you delay the video on the TV side to match the latency of the audio? I assume your TV has an option for audio delay. The problem that I’d see is that you probably don’t have this setup all the time, so switching your TV back and forth for an audio delay would be annoying. That and 500 ms might be more of a delay than your TV can handle.
  - t34543 7y ago
    Audio source is my receiver which does not offer this functionality. You’re right, config management will be painful. Receiver runs Linux and I did get a shell on it, but to be honest this is something I would rather just pay for. I don’t want to risk bricking it.
    - ghostpepper 7y ago
      I'm curious which receiver(s) run Linux
      - t34543 7y ago
        Emotiva XMC-1
      - wolrah 7y ago
        The majority of receivers above a certain point have streaming radio, "cast", and/or "smart TV" features. Just like so much of the rest of the appliance world, most of those are powered by some random ARM or MIPS SoC running some flavor of Linux. A modern networked AV receiver is sort of analogous to a managed switch, there's a fairly generic CPU running a general purpose OS presenting the user-facing interfaces, managing configuration, and handling some housekeeping tasks, then there's specialized hardware that actually deals with the signals and does the real heavy lifting after being set up by the general purpose processor..

vinw 7y ago

I couldn't get Librespot to work, will have to give it another go. What I ended up doing was running the Spotify desktop app, sinking it to the snapcast pipe via pulseaudio.

ghostpepper 7y ago
I don't think librespot is maintained anymore. If you try again, maybe give spotifyd a shot. It works well for me in a basic setup (not using Snapcast) edit: forgot link https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd
- kingosticks 7y ago
  It is maintained at https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot I don't know why the original author never merged the PRs pointing to the new repo.