How to DIY A Raspberry Pi Audio Player

Raspberry Pi has been explored by lots of people, and on this little motherboard, there’s no limit to the possibilities of your exploration. For Raspberry Pi, I am not even a little novice. So all sorts of possibilities on this platform are almost impossible for me, but until one day I decided to dig out the the most effective possibility for me from it– the audio player.I’ve tried many audio players, such as tape, CD player, MD, DAT, vinyl player, digital music player, yet one day after thinking much, I realized that just quietly listening to music is quiet enough, who care about the player?Therefore, this time I make Raspberry Pi the audio player in the principle of not tossing.

This is a very tranquil display with the packing box of Phicomn router, a display screen from Lenovo and a driver, casually pieced together. And the only one function is display.

Well, to get to the point, first of all, show the hardware I’m using:

The Raspberry Pi itself has an audio output interface, but the sound quality is poor, and it has low noise that you can clearly hear. Since it will work as an audio player, Definitely there must be an external sound card.These are two sound cards of different functions, the digital signal only output on the left, and the analog signal output on the right.

The digital chip of this sound card is Wolfson’s WM8804G chip. With I2S interface, supporting 16 to 24 audio data formats, this sound card has a very ideal distention and dynamic, which supports sampling frequency of 192 KHZ.I use the TI company professional audio decoding chip PCM5122 for this analog sound card, which supports sampling frequency of 32bit/384kHz, and the dynamic range is 112dB, and the distention degree is -93db.

To make the Raspberry Pi an easy-going audio player, we need to flash a volumio, a player that is easy-going. Volumio is very compatible, so you just need to connect it to your home stereo system or your DAC, and then connect to your home network so that you can control it through a PC, MAC, android or ios . Volumio can play music from usb, network storage, media streaming server, or as a  player of DLNA or Airplay.

Is it very simple and clear?

As for how to download and install, I won’t say much. The tutorial is very easy to get on the Internet. In fact it’s very easy as long as you download and extract the installation package from the official website. Then download a win32diskimager, which you can use to write the downloaded volumio to the TF card. If this process is unclear, things about it on Baidu is more detailed and clear. Insert Volumio written TF card into the Raspberries Pi, plug in and boot up, don’t use a connect monitor, two or three minutes later, open the phone WIFI and search a hotspot called volumio and then connect volumio, enter the password volumio2, after the connection is successful, type http://volumio.local/ in the browser. If volumio web is displayed, you succeed.

After audio files are copied into the USB, it can be inserted into the USB port of the Raspberry Pi, and then the phone which is controlling the Raspberry Pi can find these audio files, any type is OK such as FLAC, WAV, APE, and MP3.

This is the way to set up without any sound card, and when play with the sound card that comes with the Raspberry Pi, the sound is not so loud and there is obvious low noise.

After the analog sound card is inserted, select the model of this sound card in the settings. Currently, various sound cards sold on the e-commerce platform can be found in volumio. For PCM5122, I can only say that this sound card performs a bit better than that in Raspberries Pi in audio output effect, sound is a bit louder, low noise is less clear. And for the description of sound quality, well there is nothing I can say, as treble is sweet, meddle is precise and bass is deep, in a sentence such beautiful words like bright I learned none of them.

After the digital only sound card is inserted, the model of the sound card is also set in the control interface. At this time, the output of the player is the digital signal, which needs to be decoded by the external DAC to become the analog signal. The WM8804G from Wolfson is a digital receiver chip with good high-performance. This digital sound card supports both optical fiber and coaxial connections. And I am used to using optical fiber. Optical fiber transmit from audio signals to digital signals to light signals to digital audio signals, and coaxial transmit from audio signal to digital to audio signal. Seeing from the conversion mode, optical fiber conversion has two more steps than digital conversion, which are from digital signal to light signal and from light signal to digital signal. So in theory, there will be some impacts on sound quality, but there’s only optical fiber input mode on this innovation E5. But if I were to connect it to my desktop DAC, I would still use the coaxial.

It’s also easy to connect to this Raspberry Pi player with an iphone.

In addition to using this USB flash disk as a carrier of the audio files, flashing the volumio in Raspberry Pi can also play the NAS musics or musics from other LAN. In “my music”, choose equipment, scan music, then you can manage and play you own music according to the catalogue or singer in the music library . In the case of normal connection, Volumio also supports DLNA and AirPlay wireless music transmission, and iphone connection is more convenient and quick. What’s more, there is an evident quality improvement playing by Raspberries Pi than by the phone’s built-in bluetooth function. Although this is just an exploration of the basic functions of Raspberries Pi, neither complicated nor troublesome operations can make Raspberries Pi an audio player with nice sound quality, which is a big contribution.

Author: mengxiangshigezhu

Source: smzdm.com

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