Volumio – The Audiophile Music Player | Hacker News Reader

Volumio – The Audiophile Music Player

volumio.org

72 pointsyellowyacht62 comments

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.

https://moodeaudio.org

I recommend Moode highly. Works great on the Raspberry Pi with the audio output HAT of your choice.

If I recall correctly both Volumio and Moode were forks from the same project.

Does it have good spotify connect support? I mainly use volumio with spotify, driving it from my phone Spotify app.

Moode works much better actually. I can't remember exactly what caused it, but Volumio had a lot of problems with volume levels whereas Moode works perfectly. You can even swap the volume curve from logarithmic to linear.

Thanks for the recommendation

I recently looked to buy a nice AMP HAT for a Pi Zero, but they're not as many options as there were like the JustBoom Amp Zero pHAT.

Interesting, thanks for the link. Does it plug in to any of the music streaming services - Spotify (obviously) but how about Qobuz?

EDIT: I can see Spotify on the list, but Qobuz is only via UPnp, which is what I remember being unstable on Volumio.

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 page says "Free and Open Source Forever.", what are the proprietary components?

The "MyVolumio" parts. https://volumio.org/my-volumio-overview/

Thats a different product, afaik.

The whole concept is questionable - single board computers, even x86, commonly have flawed USB implementations for isochronous devices (used for high quality audio). Each individual setup will be rolling the dice on whether it works and/or is free of dropouts, in ways that are unimaginable for people who have only used USB audio on full fat PCs

It is mostly commonly run on the Raspberry Pi, for which "hat" based audio output devices use I2C, not USB.

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.

You're right to be insulted by this dark pattern. It's a manipulative exploitation of human interaction, and all too commonly used for "user engagement" - in other words, tricking you for their benefit. It angers me that this is the norm these days among private companies and even public institutions. It's condescending.

yep. "Confirmshaming" i think it's called.

Software parametric EQ has been my biggest audio breakthrough, which I evangelise at every opportunity.

For Windows at least, there is a free tool called Equalizer APO, which allows me to pipe all audio through a parametric equalizer.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/

So close! I just built it from source and had a look at it. I've been looking for years to find a proper Foobar2000 replacement for Linux. This one is tantalizingly close, with the design mode and all. But it lacks the one thing that I have yet to find in any other audio player than Foobar2000: the music library tree view with its searching, sorting, and filtering capabilities - especially the ability to search, sort, or filter on any tag, including user-defined ones.

There's a "playlist browser" widget, but it's only for playlists.

EDIT2: One very cool feature: it can automatically set ReplayGain by track or album mode depending on how the playlist is sorted.

If you build it from source, aside from the usual "which dev libraries do I need" dance to enable features and plugins, you also need to install clang and libdispatch-dev. Deadbeef doesn't support gcc [0].

[0] https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-Player/deadbeef/issues/2516

EDIT: For the most part, I use Clementine. While it doesn't search/sort on user-defined tags, it otherwise does most of what I need.

Have you tried Quod Libet[0]? The paned browser is fully customizable, and you can regex search on any tag. I wish it gave more priority to album art, but it's far and away the most powerful browsing experience I've encountered in a music player.

[0]: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Strawberry is a more up-to-date fork of Clementine, it might do what you want:

https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

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.

This seems so weird to me. Does the hifiberry outperform something like an iPod touch which has a really good DAC and gives you a perfect touch screen for $199?

You have to have quality on every link in the chain. What's the highest bitrate iPod supports and what are the specs of its DAC?

-120 dBV noise floor, absolutely flat response curve, near zero output impedance, stable voltage, 0.002% THD (-100/120dB), it can play FLAC 24/96

The iPod touch specs are slightly better than an iPhone, and some old classic models were even better.

couldn’t find the hifiberry specs sheet to compare. I imagine it’s not necessarily worse, but wondering is the whole setup worth the trouble?

I think you can totally do what you're saying and the user interface will be great, although local to the speakers. I'm not sure if iPod DAC can actually faithfully process 24/96? If so, that's an option via flac. Once you add speakers to your set up, you're looking at the same price as the chain I suggested.

The benefits of going the hifiberry route are:

- You connect from any device on your network and tell the pi to stream - either from a local NAS or from a hq streaming service like tidal

- It can pull and faithfully process 24/96 master streams and MQA

- You don't need to use a user interface on the device itself or load files onto it

- Bit of hobbyist fun

> hifiberry outperform something like an iPod touch

For anyone looking for an alternative to Hifi berry that still uses a pi:

USB Dac (eg. from schiit, or toppings). You can get great ones for $100 or drool-worthy ones for thousands... the input is digital so (with some exceptions) they all work well with a cheap pi connected to internet.

I use a cheapy USB soundcard that cost about as much as a soup and sandwich. Sounds totally fine, but it has TOSLINK output too so the DAC hardly gets used anyway. I don't understand why anyone would spend hundreds or thousands on media players and soundcards. Save it for the amp/speakers!

Or a Zipit Z2 - same DAC, a fraction of the price, and comes with a keyboard! Sure it's only got 32 megs of ram but how much do you really need to play audio?

sweet setup! any recommendations for the powered monitors?

so I know hi-fi preferences are the Vietnam of tech discussions (in the quagmire of war sense, rather than the vibrant modern economy sense) but what speakers did you pick, and why?

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?

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.)

[0] https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/which-music-player-do-you-ru...

"with bit-perfect audio quality." - isn't that what VLC does?"

Let's assume your audio files all have one of two sample rates:

- 44.1 kHz

- 48 kHz

When you play one of these audio files in VLC, will it:

A) Force the DAC to operate at the same sample rate as the file, or

B) Check the frequency at which the DAC is already operating and (if necessary) resample the stream before sending it to the DAC?

If the latter, then you won't get bit-perfect audio quality.

VLC especially does not do this - it uses software volume control (by default, I think you might be able to change this on some platforms). It also makes it hard to select exactly 100% volume, by allowing the volume control to go over 100% without any kind of detent. The odds that you're getting bit-perfect audio out of VLC is extremely poor.

Side note - bit-perfect is very important when you want to listen to surround-encoded files (AC3, DTS) on a surround system over SPDIF. SPDIF only has bandwidth for two uncompressed PCM channels, so the way it works is basically compressed audio data pretending to be a PCM stream. If anything messes with the stream - if you touch the software volume knob - your surround system will start outputting digital static at maximum volume.

Ok thanks. I'm confused why audio software having "software volume control" would be a bad thing. Yeah, I notice on my Mac the VLC volume (the "mouse wheel on video" volume) goes up to 200%! Never gave that much of a thought, except maybe everyone likes going to 11.

I assumed from the "not bit-perfect audio" that VLC somehow misses bits or something, as in, doesn't play all the music information, but from your comment it just sounds something to do with volume. I also don't understand a word of your second paragraph, but I won't worry about that—they sound like dark, arcane realms of knowledge safer to avoid.

If you alter the volume, you alter the bits (which means not bitperfect playback). It reduces the available bits.

When you use software volume control, you're not changing the volume of the speakers - you're changing the volume of the recording. If your speakers have any background hiss - and they do - then making the recording quieter makes that hiss easier to hear. What's more, even the recording itself actually inherently has a kind of "hiss" because, in any recording medium, there is a quietest possible sound.

You can hear it for yourself - turn the volume in VLC very low down, and your speakers all the way up to compensate, and listen to a record - it'll sound bad. The louder your speakers, the lower you'll be able to crank VLC, and the worse the whole thing will sound.

Making the recording louder is - theoretically - fine; it shouldn't make it sound any worse. But if the recording is well-mixed, there's no headroom to make it louder and it will distort - this is because the engineers make the recording as loud as possible to avoid exactly the above issue.

Thank you for explaining! (Also I'd love to read something 50x longer on the subject.)

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.

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 (http://www.hifiberry.com/dacs).

The idea is to bring the lossless audio available on LAN to the audio sink (speakers) with as little quality loss as possible.

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.

Especially if you use Neutron or Poweramp as music players. Android now has special low latency APIs (and the Oboe library - https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio )

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- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.extreamsd....

or you can use the newer android 11 with bluetooth 5.2 and APTX adaptive (or LDAC) earphones for high quality wireless audio.

Plus, you can stream them on chromecast.

Is there a fundamental reason why people prefer to listen to audio on laptops versus a smartphone ?

Whats the benefit of low latency when playing prerecorded music?

singing apps. especially if you're using bluetooth headsets.

How do you connect a big harddrive with all your music (in flac) to phone ? A phone would require some kind of service (not free) for streaming the songs. I prefer to have everything on my harddrive (i do not like to lose audio when the network is down).

I'm uncertain what this is.

It says open source, and there is https://github.com/volumio/volumio

However the docs discuss "device activation codes" and the volumio website talks about paid stuff.

It's gratis and open source, but they offer some 'premium' features as a service.

I used volumio at home in the last few years and it was good overall. Only annoying thing was trying to get multiroom audio working ... I eventually did, but it took a lot of hacking around. Maybe it's easier now, I don't know.

I get a 404 when I click on your link.

I think this is the correct link: https://github.com/volumio/Volumio2

I want to look more into this because one player for Tidal/Spotify and my own library sounds very interesting.

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.

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.

Either the Pi or the NUC should transfer digital audio via HDMI; that uses the DAC in your receiver.

Thanks, it's a wifi-enabled network receiver that does not have HDMI, only SPDIF.

So I guess without buying an additional hardware adapter I could get there by connecting the NUC via HDMI to my TV which is already connected to the receiver via SPDIF. The only downside there is that I need to have the TV turned on while playing music.

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.

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.

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.

Still looking for some PowerAmp alternative for iPhone though.

Volumio is based on Debian:

https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/Volumio

At the start of the pandemic, I decided to treat myself with a high quality audio setup.

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).

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 contributed Google Play Music integration a couple of years ago, which is now obsolete I guess ;)

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.

What takedown are you talking about ?

Similar app for Android: https://neutroncode.com/apps/player

I was using Volumio but switch to Moode. I recommend it Open Source and it works. I wish there was a mobile app for Moode.

It really looks like my old SqueezeBox touch (which stll does a really great job till this day)

651mb the zip file, excuse me sir?

It's meant to be the entire OS for a RaspPi. Load it up on the cheapest SD card you have and boot.

setup sounds sweet! any recommendations for the powered monitors?

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