Next step for hifi?

[Womaz]

Buy a new one! (laptop).

Cheaper than a streamer, and you don't have to share with your daughter!

My Music is already stored on my NAS drive. Do you mean just keep the lap top for control use?

If thats the case I would prefer a streamer. Thanks for input though

 

[cheeseboy]

I prefer Rune Audio to Volumio. The webUI is virtually identical, but Rune seems to be developing rather quicker and support, when/if needed, from the devolpers is very good through their forum.

cheers for the headsup, i shall have a butchers.

 

[SteveR750]

Buy a new one! (laptop).

Cheaper than a streamer, and you don't have to share with your daughter!

My Music is already stored on my NAS drive. Do you mean just keep the lap top for control use?

If thats the case I would prefer a streamer. Thanks for input though

Yes, that's how I use mine. I have thought about adding a streamer, but I am reluctant to buy another very expensive box that doesn't add anything sonically (or should that be take away). The opinion seems to be that J River (or Foobar) is capable of bit perfect streaming, so in theory you can't get a "better" data source to feed into your DAC.

I don't use my laptop very often as a laptop, as I've got a couple of others for general use. I keep all of my music on its hard drive (with a portable seagate backup drive just in case) so it's fully portable. I needed a new laptop at the time, so I justified buying a well specced one, cost offset by selling my CDP.

 

[matt49]

There's these ones here https://www.hifiberry.com/product-category/bundles/

Volumio is pretty easy to install. Basically download, extract and use a bit of software to dump on the memory card then plug the memory card in to the pi and turn on. https://volumio.org/get-started

I've seen other places sell it with Volumio and rune audio already installed, but at the moment can't find the bl**dy links! Will post when i do.

Thanks for that. I'll have a look when I get a few minutes.

 

[Craig M.]

Does your amp have a USB or ethernet input? Maybe changing NAS to a Synology one would suffice? They have an audio player called Audio Station that could play via USB or over the network, no need for another box and control via pc/smart phone/tablet. They can also stream your music to you on the move - I listen to mine through my phone whilst walking the dog.

 

[daveh75]

I prefer Rune Audio to Volumio. The webUI is virtually identical, but Rune seems to be developing rather quicker and support, when/if needed, from the devolpers is very good through their forum.

cheers for the headsup, i shall have a butchers.

That's because the Volumio UI was built by the Rune devs. Runeaudio is the result of a falling out with the Volumio founder/lead dev.

I've always preferred Runeaudio to Volumio, it performs much better imo.

Oh and on a RPi 2 it screams.

The only caveat being there's no official support for the RPi 2 from rune yet, so if you want to use runeaudio on one you'll either have to build it yourself using the 'cookbook' provided by the rune devs, or use one of the unofficial images built by members of the community, or wait for the official build to be released.