'Analog Dinosaur' succumbs to the joys of FBA : enter Raspberry Pi 2/IQ-Audio DAC+!!

[Krisbee]

what is the best way to power on/off the pi?

What do you guys do?.. or do you leave it on?

If you're powering it from a battery, you might not want to do that. In any case, you pay for kWh so you may, or may not, think consuming a couple of watts 24/7 for 365 days of the year is a trivial sum.

Personally, I wouldn't use a Rpi unless it could reliably go through a normal boot shutdown cycle once a day. Use the Volumio interface to turn if off which actually just halts the system. Then wait 30 secs to be safe before switching off power.

[Bonky]

...Still waiting for my IQAudio DAC to arrive.

On the subject of using a Mac to flash a micro-SD card with Volumio:

I found this very frustrating. I downloaded Piwriter (v.1 and v.2) but there appears (from Googling it) to be problems/issues with Yosemite OS; I certainly couldn't get it to work.

I then used Windows7 (in both Bootcamp and Parallels mode - Mac users will know what I mean) and got utterly frustrated at the amount of advert web pages that opened when trying to download Volumio.

In the end I downloaded all the files I needed on the Mac and then copied them across to Windows7. I then used Win2DiskImager to flash the micro Sd card. (Win32 looks like something from the 1970s ...but it worked).

TBH I cannot understand why one needs dedicated software on the Mac. Surely one needs to erase the SD card using DiskUtiltiy (set to FAT32) and then drag-and-drop the Volumio contents across.(?)

I accidentally wiped all my data on an attached USB drive - so please heed all the warnings. Luckily nothing important was lost.

I have a 'few' spare USB hard drives I could use to attach to the Pi. I have a question: would I be better buying a NAS? (either one I populated myself with the spare HDs I have (assuming I can unscrew the cases and that the HDs have a SATA link)), or buy a dedicated NAS (e.g. from the Synology stable (e.g. DS215j))?

Thanks,

Richard.

Richard.

[martinswimmer]

I've just put 3 images (Volumio, Rune and Pico) on - using just Terminal on Mountain Lion Following these instructions: Run:
diskutil list
identify the disk (not partition) of your SD card. e.g. disk4 (not disk4s1)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/<disk# from diskutil>
e.g. diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
sudo dd bs=1m if=<your image file>.img of=/dev/<disk# from diskutil>
e.g. sudo dd bs=1M if=2014-09-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk4
(This will take a few minutes)

Dead easy!

[Krisbee]

...
I have a 'few' spare USB hard drives I could use to attach to the Pi. I have a question: would I be better buying a NAS? (either one I populated myself with the spare HDs I have (assuming I can unscrew the cases and that the HDs have a SATA link)), or buy a dedicated NAS (e.g. from the Synology stable (e.g. DS215j))?

Thanks,

Richard.
.

Without a powered USB hub, the RPi is limited to a little over 1a max current draw through it's USB ports, so to attach more than one modern 2.5 USB drive to the RPi you'd probably need a powered hub. I'd try one USB HDD first to see if the RPi+ Pi-DAC+ lives up to your expectations, then think about investing in something like the DS215j and any new HDDs.

[Bonky]

Without a powered USB hub, the RPi is limited to a little over 1a max current draw through it's USB ports, so to attach more than one modern 2.5 USB drive to the RPi you'd probably need a powered hub. I'd try one USB HDD first to see if the RPi+ Pi-DAC+ lives up to your expectations, then think about investing in something like the DS215j and any new HDDs.

Thanks; the spare HDs i have are all 'powered'.

On another question: I have an iTunes library (quite a large one) AND a High Def library (with FLAC files etc) on the iMac, would the Pi be able to read both on the same HD? (I suspect that the answer is 'yes').

And thanks Martin for your answer; seems a little complicated to my mind (I can't believe that decades ago I was regarded as a computer guru) ...now so far behind...!

BW

Richard.

[martinswimmer]

It seems daunting but literally 3 lines of text pasted into the Terminal window...

[Marco]

Hi Jo,

Glad you're loving it so far!

Thanks, Marco.

Does it automatically go in to a dormant state after a while?

Not as such. However, if it's not processing a music signal, then it is effectively 'dormant'. I leave mine switched on all the time, as I feel that's the correct thing to do, sonically and electrically.

When I need to switch it off (say when changing PSUs or SD cards), I go into the 'Turn Off' menu in Volumio and select the 'Power Off' option. I then allow about 30 seconds for it to carry that out, then do what I need to do. NEVER just switch off the RPi from the mains without going through the Power Off procedure, as otherwise you can corrupt the SD card.

Are we finding about 30% of the PCM master volume in alsamixer about average? Not disabled the volume in volumio yet.

The best plan is to set the PCM level at 86, for the meantime, and both of the boost options in alsamixer to full, select your preferred DSP filter (I mainly settle on the default one), and exit from alsamixer, shutting the terminal down afterwards. Then, with the 'Hardware' option in the Playback section of Volumio activated, adjust the PCM level on Playback, if necessary from the 86 position, using the little round numerical dial there to alter what is effectively the gain.

Adjust it to suit the requirements of your preamp, in terms of ensuring that you're able to use an adequate range of the volume control and that the sound is neither week or saturated sounding. This will vary from recording to recording, with some needing more input level (gain) than others. For lowest possible distortion the ideal PCM level is 86, but with some preamps that may be too low (I vary mine between 86 and 90), however if you can use it successfully at 86 (0db), then so much the better.

There are also a few other tweaks you can do. Essentially, you want to minimise the amount of processes running on the RPi at the one time, so you should disable everything that's unnecessary in normal use. In that respect, go into the Playback section and disable the 'Buffer before play' option (it should be set at 10% as default), as long as you can get away with it without incurring any skipping during playback.

Then go into the 'System' section and disable everything in 'Services Management', together with 'Streaming Services', if you have no plans to run Spotify. Also disable everything under 'Miscellaneous' and 'Compatibility Fixes'. You can then play around with 'Sound quality tweaks' and see whether you can hear any advantages in moving from the default position. My preference is for 'OCX', but you may like something else. The sonic differences are rather subtle, but in my opinion, worthwhile.

Hope this helps, and enjoy!

Marco.

[drpetar]

what is the best way to power on/off the pi?

What do you guys do?.. or do you leave it on?

Leave it on, bruv

The more on/off, off/on that occurs, the more chance there is of something going wrong. The RPi draws a minuscule amount of current, so best just to leave it powered up, but dormant, then wake it up when you want to play moosik.

Marco.

If you're powering it from a battery, you might not want to do that. In any case, you pay for kWh so you may, or may not, think consuming a couple of watts 24/7 for 365 days of the year is a trivial sum.

Personally, I wouldn't use a Rpi unless it could reliably go through a normal boot shutdown cycle once a day. Use the Volumio interface to turn if off which actually just halts the system. Then wait 30 secs to be safe before switching off power.

I have this on/off dilemma too. I thought to leave the RPi on all the time, but I live in an area, where occasionally power cuts occur and this may corrupt the sd card. In the other hand if I halt the system (turn off through Volumio interface) I find it very annoying to unplug/plug the PSU to turn the RPi on.

Using a battery pack would be a solution but... The RPi 2 draws about 300-500 mA. If I leave it on all the time it is about 7000-12000 mA for 24 h. Actually I tried with a 10000mA battery and it indicated about 50% discharge from morning to evening even when RPi is not in use but powered on. So the battery needs to be charged every night (using a timer is a good solution) and it must be powerful enough. And again if I turn off the RPi when not in use, I have to unplug/plug the USB cable from the battery to turn it on again.

Then I started to wonder if someone has invented some switch and found this solution. Didn't try it though. The switches are intelligent, i.e. they first halted the system (=turn off; =shutdown -h) and after that cut all the power to the RPi.

Other solutions would be this and this. But the risk is to forget to turn off from Volumio interface first. And what about the SQ?

Another solution would be to use a PSU with switch, for example this (the option with DC-5V/2.5A) And again the risk is to forget to turn off from Volumio interface first.

How did I solve the dilemma so far? I leave the RPi on all the time

[Kit1cat]

You could use this with a battery http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-Cable-...item4d1c7282d0

[The Black Adder]

Many thanks, Marco... all set.

I am now however wanting to check alsamixer but putty is hanging on the password part after the login. Does anyone know why this is? I logged on to it last night with no problem using:

login - root
password - volumio

Now it wont let me type the password in, just hangs and then times out saying 'Sever unexpectedly closed network connection'

any ideas?