Adding radio stations to Volumio (RPi 2)

[RichB]

Finally set up tonight with my Pi2 and IQ DAC + after getting my hands on another sd card which worked first time.

Got the wifi sorted with the edimax dongle etc... Going to set up the network share tomorrow but in the meantime I'm wondering how I can get my favourite Radio Paradise stream playing on this thing....

There seems to be a function in the webradio bit of volumio for adding stations which asks you to give the station a name and add a URL but having done that, when I click on the station it just says 'adding to playlist' and then the playlist is empty and nothing plays... all the other ones which volumio puts on as standard are working fine and thats how I got it up and running.

Sorry if this is a numpty question but RP to me is probably what i listen to most often and is always on when I'm just around the house... I'm lost without it.

I also used to have the naim exclsuive link working perfectly on my SBT so there must be some way I can get this running on the Pi. Also wondering if anyone has the URL for that I can use when I'm adding the station.

Apologies if I'm asking something which may have been answered already on the mega thread but I can't be doing with trawling that whole thing in the hope of an answer.. quite simply, I just want to know how to get it to play any of the higher quality RP streams.

As an aside I'm really not that impressed with the IQ DAC at all for the Pi, its early days so I'll give it a chance to run in but my initial thoughts were that it sounded as rough as the proverbial badger's hind quarters... I might move it on if anyone's interested and see if I can get this running with my Vlink and Rega DAC instead rather than throw money on overspec'd PSUs for a change.

Anyway, please help or point me in the right direction to get my favourite station back.

Moochosgrassyarse

R

[NRG]

As an aside I'm really not that impressed with the IQ DAC at all for the Pi, its early days so I'll give it a chance to run in but my initial thoughts were that it sounded as rough as the proverbial badger's hind quarters... I might move it on if anyone's interested and see if I can get this running with my Vlink and Rega DAC instead rather than throw money on overspec'd PSUs for a change.

Anyway, please help or point me in the right direction to get my favourite station back.

Moochosgrassyarse

R

As an "aside" ? Thats not how I would describe the IQDac+...out of the box the IQ Dac is clean and with no obvious fault, if you are hearing roughness then you may have set the alsamixer settings too hot for your system, the DAC is anything but 'rough' :mental: or you have a fault elsewhere...

[RichB]

As an "aside" ? Thats not how I would describe the IQDac+...out of the box the IQ Dac is clean and with no obvious fault, if you are hearing roughness then you may have set the alsamixer settings too hot for your system, the DAC is anything but 'rough' :mental: or you have a fault elsewhere...

I'll have a look at the settings but there's definitely coarseness and grain to its sound. Perhaps this improves with better power supply but I'm not prepared to throw money at it as some have.

[Gazjam]

I had the same problem getting RP on RuneAudio as well, yet 320k Naim exclusive stream works great on my SB Transporter.
Wouldn't be without RP Rich, discovered so much new music from it.

Agree with Neil actually On the Dac sound quality, I found the Dac+ to sound very good as well.
Perhaps a bit more lean in the mids than I'm used to, but still excellent sounding.
Have a look at your AlsaMixer settings mate.

@Neil
I use RuneAudio and have disabled the volume control in settings.
I'm assuming this takes AlsaMixer out the picture all together, would that be right enough?

Thanks. :)

[lovejoy]

This is the playlist file I use for Radio Paradise at 320Kbps. If you save the following as a .pls file, then just copy it to the WEBRADIO directory on your Pi, it will be picked up after a reboot. If you can see the Pi over your network, then you should see the WEBRADIO directory as a share, so you should be able to just drag and drop the file in there.

[playlist]
NumberOfEntries=1
Title1=Radio Paradise @ 320Kbps
File1=http://stream-uk1.radioparadise.com:80/aac-320

As to the sound of the IQ DAC - What are you playing from at the moment? If you've not played anything lossless yet, then it's probably just showing up the artefacts of what you are playing - it can be rather unforgiving to low bit rate audio. Once you've got your NAS share setup, try some lossless audio and ensure the volume control is set up for hardware output and you have the level set to 86% which is the max output from the DAC chip without applying any extra amplification. You can wind this up a bit if it's a bit quiet later, but best not to go above 92 or so or you start to get distortion, especially with louder recordings.

[martinswimmer]

And try upsampling. Without it, i find the sound just like you described it...