All -
I know I'm literally years late to the party, but I just bought a Raspberry Pi.
What fun!
I held off buying a case - and more important, a DAC - until I could run the thing for a bit, make sure I understood it. It was on my front porch yesterday, and after the house got quiet, I opened the package, dumped the thing, the power supply and the SD card out onto the kitchen table.
Installing piCorePlayer onto the SD card was trivial, though after I booted the Pi with the card in it I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it wasn't showing up on wifi. This was one of those "How have I gotten so old and stupid" moments. After staring at things for a bit, sanity returned, I grabbed a LAN cable, plugged everything in and found the Pi right where it should be.
My guess is the options on other distros like Max2Play may be a bit easier for some, but setting up the USB DAC I had for the test - an old I Basso headphone amp/DAC - wasn't terrible. I had to try a few options under "output device" before I found one that worked, but once I did I had one of those rare, satisfying moments you don't get very often with computers or audio gear these days, the feeling that you contributed to making it work. Well, satisfying after I wasted a few more minutes clicking around the web interface for pCP, looking for the "player."
Finally, it dawned on me that I was once again acting my age. I grabbed an iPad, opened my player app - and there it was, ready to go.
So now I've got to figure out what to do with it: I still use a Classic in my family room/main set up, and connectivity is awful at my office. I'm torn between buying a DAC hat and buying an amp, adding a couple of boutique audio speakers i bought a few years back, and putting the thing somewhere - I don't know where yet - as another system.
I guess the big thing for me is, I realize in my gut now what I've carried around in my head for a few years, the knowledge that the Squeezebox idea actually has a pretty healthy afterlife, even though Logitech is out of the business other than generously keeping the servers up and running. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the work so far, and am looking forward to finishing this small project.
s.
I know I'm literally years late to the party, but I just bought a Raspberry Pi.
What fun!
I held off buying a case - and more important, a DAC - until I could run the thing for a bit, make sure I understood it. It was on my front porch yesterday, and after the house got quiet, I opened the package, dumped the thing, the power supply and the SD card out onto the kitchen table.
Installing piCorePlayer onto the SD card was trivial, though after I booted the Pi with the card in it I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it wasn't showing up on wifi. This was one of those "How have I gotten so old and stupid" moments. After staring at things for a bit, sanity returned, I grabbed a LAN cable, plugged everything in and found the Pi right where it should be.
My guess is the options on other distros like Max2Play may be a bit easier for some, but setting up the USB DAC I had for the test - an old I Basso headphone amp/DAC - wasn't terrible. I had to try a few options under "output device" before I found one that worked, but once I did I had one of those rare, satisfying moments you don't get very often with computers or audio gear these days, the feeling that you contributed to making it work. Well, satisfying after I wasted a few more minutes clicking around the web interface for pCP, looking for the "player."
Finally, it dawned on me that I was once again acting my age. I grabbed an iPad, opened my player app - and there it was, ready to go.
So now I've got to figure out what to do with it: I still use a Classic in my family room/main set up, and connectivity is awful at my office. I'm torn between buying a DAC hat and buying an amp, adding a couple of boutique audio speakers i bought a few years back, and putting the thing somewhere - I don't know where yet - as another system.
I guess the big thing for me is, I realize in my gut now what I've carried around in my head for a few years, the knowledge that the Squeezebox idea actually has a pretty healthy afterlife, even though Logitech is out of the business other than generously keeping the servers up and running. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the work so far, and am looking forward to finishing this small project.
s.