I switched my home audio system from Volumio to Moode after Volumio started switching out lots of standard OSS components to weird in-house stuff.<p><a href="https://moodeaudio.org" rel="nofollow">https://moodeaudio.org</a><p>I recommend Moode highly. Works great on the Raspberry Pi with the audio output HAT of your choice.
Lots of comments from people unsure what this actually is: It's an operating system primarily designed for single board computers that turns them into audio player appliances. It has some proprietary components that I don't like but there are alternatives, such as Moode, Picoreplayer, Roon, Rune, and so on.
The fact that I have to click "I don't like music" or enter my email address to look at the website is toxic. As someone who was psychologically and emotionally abused by someone with a narcissistic personality disorder for decades I consider this to be psychological abuse. Abusers put you in situations where you can't be honest and then use that against you. Call me triggered if you want, I don't particularly care.
Software parametric EQ has been my biggest audio breakthrough, which I evangelise at every opportunity.<p>For Windows at least, there is a free tool called Equalizer APO, which allows me to pipe all audio through a parametric equalizer.<p>Parametric EQ allows me to place 'negative peaks' the response curve with just the right frequency, bandwidth and attenuation to cancel out the 'positive peaks' caused by resonant frequencies of my headphones.<p>It's a bit tricky to set up - first you need to set an A-weighted equal-volume EQ curve, and listen to pure sine tones (and a frequency sweep) to pick out where it's particularly loud (i.e. where the speakers/headphones' resonant frequencies), then place and fine-tune your 'negative' peaks to cancel those out. Usually only a couplw of peaks are required to cancel out the main resonant frequencies. The aim is to have a sine sweep of equal apparent volume.<p>The result smooths out the resonant frequencies present in pretty much all speaker and headphone systems, giving a flat response - also accounting for similar effects within the individual listener's ears.
There's also Deadbeef[1], which resembles Foobar2000 user experience.<p>[1] <a href="https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/" rel="nofollow">https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/</a>
I've used this for a few years as my main hifi. Runs on a pi with the hifiberry HAT, which sits just behind one of the powered monitors. If you are a bit of an audiophile then this is an extremely cheap way to get very high quality audio into your house. The chain is something like: 1. Tidal or Qobuz master stream pulled by volumio, 2. Hifiberry DAC, 3. Good powered reference monitors. This whole chain has a set up cost of about £250/$300 and gives the same audio quality as turnkey commercial systems (e.g. from Linn Audio) that cost >>£1000. It also has an extremely small form factor, obviously thanks to the pi, so the whole thing can fit nicely into a bookcase, for example.
I don't really understand. "One Single Digital Audio Player for all your music, with bit-perfect audio quality." - isn't that what VLC does?<p>Judging by this thread[0] it's good for people who like thumbnail images with tracks? And it "works well with music libraries"? – not sure what that means, I've never used specialized software to organize/navigate my music files. (Am not an 'audiophile', just a musician.)<p>[0] <a href="https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/which-music-player-do-you-run-under-linux/8314/30" rel="nofollow">https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/which-music-player-do-you-ru...</a>
I switched from Volumio to HifiBerry OS when buying their DSP board to my rpi. The OS supports Spotify, mpd, DLNA, BlueTooth and Airplay out of the box quite nicely. The nice extra feature is how you can connect a mic to the pi, and they have software to measure your room compensation to get the best out of your system.<p>Our living room has enough corners for any system to sound great without heavy acoustics paneling or carefully setting all speakers to boost or lower the right frequencies. This tool automates most of the hard work, letting you to tweak the result easily.
I am using Volumio since more than 5 years and even updated the hardware version of the Raspberry in the meantime.
Since the analogue output of the raspberry is sub-par regarding quality, I chose to add an extra DAC (<a href="http://www.hifiberry.com/dacs" rel="nofollow">http://www.hifiberry.com/dacs</a>).<p>The idea is to bring the lossless audio available on LAN to the audio sink (speakers) with as little quality loss as possible.<p>Volumio does a great job and a few of my friends are also using it now.
I have found it generally better to completely switch over to mobile based music playing experience.
Android + Dropbox is fairly good as an noob audiophile setup.<p>Especially if you use Neutron or Poweramp as music players. Android now has special low latency APIs (and the Oboe library - <a href="https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio</a> )<p>Poweramp and Neutron both implement their own low latency code and are very very good. If you connect them to a USB type c (like the FiiO), they are very very good to be used with audiophile grade earphones. UAPP is the other one which boasts compatibility with all the latest dacs and audio chips ... as well as MQA decoding- <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.extreamsd.usbaudioplayerpro&hl=en_IN&gl=US" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.extreamsd....</a><p>or you can use the newer android 11 with bluetooth 5.2 and APTX adaptive (or LDAC) earphones for high quality wireless audio.<p>Plus, you can stream them on chromecast.<p>Is there a fundamental reason why people prefer to listen to audio on laptops versus a smartphone ?
I'm uncertain what this is.<p>It says open source, and there is <a href="https://github.com/volumio/volumio" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/volumio/volumio</a><p>However the docs discuss "device activation codes" and the volumio website talks about paid stuff.
I want to look more into this because one player for Tidal/Spotify and my own library sounds very interesting.<p>Is there a way I can set this up right now when all I have is a Yamaha Receiver and an older Pi (and an older intel nuc), It's not immediately clear if I need an extra DAC or I can use the one builtin to the receiver.<p>The Yamaha MusicCast app also has Spotify+Tidal+MyMusic but the experience is horrible. So I usually just use Spotify Connect in the Spotify app to play on the receiver because the app experience is best there but music quality is less than Tidal. Tidal has better music quality but the Tidal app does not allow me to connect to the receiver.
I recently moved my 400 GB music collection to nextcloud music. It is served from a Rpi on my bookshelf with an attached 1 TB SSD. So far, so good. It is streaming my music collection to computers on my LAN, but not outside my network.<p>I'm still getting used to listening to music in the browser, but I think it's worth it since I no longer have to manage plugging an external SSD into different computers.<p>Nextcloud music is slow, but it works well enough, and nextcloud has some other nice things going on. Not sure if I would be better served by Volumio.<p>Still looking for some PowerAmp alternative for iPhone though.
Volumio is based on Debian:<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/Volumio" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/Volumio</a>
At the start of the pandemic, I decided to treat myself with a high quality audio setup.<p>I found Volumio and decided to buy a Volumio Primo (it’s their high quality streamer, if you don’t want to build one of a Raspberry Pi).<p>I love it. I combine it with Roon, so that I play music anywhere at home over the network. I use Volumio as a DAC, and also to occasionally stream radio and podcasts.
I paid for and used Volumio for several months, but found it fairly unstable and in need of frequent reboots. In the end I bit the bullet and paid for Roon, although I'm now regretting that in light of the Youtube Tidal/MQA takedown.
Similar app for Android: <a href="https://neutroncode.com/apps/player" rel="nofollow">https://neutroncode.com/apps/player</a>