Problem
For a long time the lacking support for external wifi dongles was to me a big issue with the otherwise best music player Pi OS. Because as soon as you put your Pi in a (metal)case or it is not really close to an access point, the interface and Spotify connect especially become a little frustrating to use.
Solution
Hifiberry OS 64 is compatible with the Raspberry Pi Compute module 4 now, earlier releases were not. The compute module has a socket for an external wifi antenna that performs a lot better than the onboard antenna of the pi4 and pi5 and on top of that it is a solid plastic antenna that can be fixed to a case, so to me it is better than a usb dongle.
There is a connection board from waveshare that you can get on German Berrybase for 20 Euros (I am not affiliated with either, just where I bought it). The original external antenna costs 5.50 Euros. Finally, the compute module lite is a little cheaper than the complete Pi4, costing 43 Euros.
So all in all it sums up to 69 Euros, which is very close to the price of a Pi4 and a wifi dongle with an antenna.
I am testing it with a Beocreate board and so far it works well.
Hifiberry Team, could you please keep support for the compute module in Hifiberry OS 64 and maybe even include it in your release testing? I will also create a feature request for this on Github.
Here are the links to the parts I described (again, I am not affiliated with them):
https://www.berrybase.de/mini-base-board-a-fuer-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4
https://www.berrybase.de/antennenkit-fuer-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4
https://www.berrybase.de/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-2gb-ram-lite-wlan-bt
