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Wasting a lot of time

Simon West

May 18, 2018 05:20

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I recently bought a RPi 3B+, the official touch screen, and a HifiBerry DAC+ under the impression that I would be able to make a nice digital music source for my home stereo system.

200+ hours of faffing around later, I have yet to be able to get a single MP3 played.

 

I have tried installing installing Max2Play and Volumio, but I'm not interested in streaming music or accessing an interface through a web browser.

 

I just want to be able to plug a USB stick with my music on it into the Pi, choose the music I want from the touch screen and play the song... the kind of thing that I do on my mobile phone every day... Is that too much to ask?

 

Can anyone recommend a way to play with this setup, with a nice graphical interface... not some command line bollocks... before I throw the lot in the bin?

 

Thanks

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5 comments

• 0
  
  hifi May 18, 2018 15:02

  I was in the same situation about 3 years ago. I didn't need web UI and I didn't need any HDMI TV attached to my system.
  After some research I decided to create such player myself. I cannot say that it has a nice UI but it's usable and I'm working
  on it and trying to improve it. It's mostly oriented towards small LCDs (3"-4") as that was my original target but should work
  on large LCD as well. You can install it on top of regular Raspbian distribution and if you don't like it just throw it to the bin :)
  
  https://github.com/project-owner/PeppyPlayers.doc/wiki
  
  I'll be glad to help if you will have any questions/issues.
  
  

  Edited by hifi May 18, 2018 15:12
• 0
  
  Ted Evans May 23, 2018 06:37

  I feel for you because I'm in the same boat as you.

  Runeaudio sticks at rainbow screen of death despite creating 2 sd cards with rufus, win32, diskpart or whatever. Just wont boot.

  I have got OSMC to start via noobs, but frequent blue screens of death (one plain blue, one tinting into a tasteful bown around the edges) , a user interface that was clearly designed to annoy rather than allow parameters to be changed.

  My situation with hifiberry is I finally managed to get the overlay specified, and I set audio output to alsa.

  However when I reboot the pi and check to see if alsa is correctly setup, the alsa option isnt available anymore. HDMI or analogue only. No idea why. it doesnt work.

  And as for usability?  wtf?  i transferred all (100s) of my (legally bought) CD to computer, organised by singer\album. VLC on windows is all I ever needed, but all these music players seem to want me to specify playlists. and are so slow on a pi its almost its hard to know its ignoring keystrokes.

  I live in the third world so I have no alternative to getting this junk working.  A sort of solution that does work is to use an HDMI breakout box, that gives a TOSlink connection back to a DAC. How I wish I had brought my Sony CD player and CD collection.

  All this stuff proves is the old adage that Linux is free as long as your time is worthless.

• 0
  
  Ted Evans May 31, 2018 08:15

  to 6515cg

  I've installed volumio as well. It works fine on analog and HDMI - it doesnt work on the hifiberry, constantly get alsa errors unless I set generic DAC or the wrong Hifiberry card (have to specify DAC not digi).

  however when i do that it still doesn't work.  no spdif lock on the DAC and no light shining down the TOSlink cable.

  I've spent weeks trying to get this working now, getting nowhere. Surprisingly enough, I want to listen to music, not become a Linux expert.

  volumio support is useless.

  As far as Im concerned the Hifiberry just doesn't work. Its a piece of junk, and support is non-existent.  My plan now is to wait until my next foreign trip and buy a competing spdif card. Then I shall see what happens.

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team May 31, 2018 18:32

  @Ted: I can't find any problem reports from you. Did you contact us before? We can help you checking if the hardware is working well. Just get in touch with us by mailing to support@hifiberry.com

  Best regards,
  Daniel

• 0
  
  Grover June 08, 2018 18:19

  So far have 2 screens (Running 24/7) with another 2 possibly 3 planned...(Not counting the Pi's on every TV) 

  Screen 1 Hallway Wall Mounted- LibreELEC/Kodi with Estouchy skin, HFB DAC + RCA connected to AVR. Accesses mp3's over SMB shares. Stream Pandora (Pandoki) too. Because it's also a TV, and am already using Windows Media Center (DVR) (ServerWMC) & HD Homerun Prime cable card (Verizon - TV/Internet Provider) using HD HOMERUN app for music channels.

  Screen 2 Master Bathroom, Wall Mounted- Same as above, but it uses HFB DAC pro (Has 5v +/- pass through atop board that powers screen)

  Link I used for setup https://www.hifiberry.com/build/documentation/libreelec-installation-and-configuration/

  Love the sound.... Picture of DAC pro powering screen.

  Thank for producing such cool product!