playing with Volumio

I’ve made some progress with Volumio, and I’m having fun with it, so I thought I’d write a follow-up to my previous post.

The DAC that I ordered from HiFiBerry has shipped, but it turns out they’re in Switzerland, so it’s going to take a while to get here. (I’d have know that if I’d read their about page.) So I’ve decided to go ahead and start using the Pi as-is, through the headphone jack. Sound quality is OK, but I’m hoping the DAC improves it.

I’ve installed MPoD on my iPhone, and I think that’s the best way to control Volumio, though it doesn’t let you start a web radio station; it’s just good for your local music. But it’s much better for navigating my music collection than the Volumio web interface. I may mess around with other MPD clients at some point, and see if I can find a good one for Mac and/or Windows, but I’m fine with just MPoD for now.

I’m still not sure how I want to hook up my music collection to the Pi, but for now, I’m using a 32 GB USB thumb drive. As of this morning, I’ve copied over about 6GB worth of music, which is enough to mess around with, but not really a significant portion of my collection. Yesterday, I saw a 128 GB thumb drive on sale for $30, so maybe that’s the way to go.

I wasn’t initially that interested in the web radio functionality of Volumio, but I think it might come in handy. Where I live, I don’t have much luck receiving radio signals (too far from both New York and Philly), so I don’t listen to much radio at home. But, if I can get a few interesting stations set up, maybe that will be useful. Volumio ships with a bunch of stations already set up, but around half of them don’t work. I figured out enough to add a couple of stations on my own, but I only got one working, WXPN, which is a Philly station that I can usually pick up on my stereo, but not always. I’ve also tried getting WQXR set up, but I haven’t gotten that working. And WFMU is one of the stations in the default list that works, so that’s cool. I used to listen to them a lot, before I moved out of their range.

So I’m having fun with this. It’s giving me a chance to dig into my music collection, and find stuff I haven’t listened to in a long time. And it’s motivating me to organize the collection a bit more.

And it’s fun to play with the Raspberry Pi. I have a few ideas about other uses for a Pi, so I may find myself ordering another one at some point.

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