| RaspiFi was brought to our attention a few days ago: it’s a distro designed especially for those with big media libraries who are using their Pis to listen to music. If you’re one of those people (I am, and I’m chuffed to bits to find RaspiFi), or an honest-to-god audiophile, you may have noticed that other media centre distros have been built to prioritise video rather than music, and don’t necessarily support all the formats your collection might be made up of; or give you the fine degree of control you want over volume and playback. And if you want to stream music wirelessly to other devices on your network, you’ll have to do a little more work with a traditional Raspberry Pi media centre (I can’t believe I’m saying “traditional” about a device that’s only been on the market for 18 months) to get everything working. So RaspiFi has been engineered to address those issues. Apple AirPlay works out of the box, so you can stream to other devices without any extra work. The distro supports a large number of external USB DACs (there is a pleasingly lengthy list on the project website) and asynchronous playback, so you can use your other amplifiers and DACs instead of the one that’s onboard the Pi – which, let’s face it, wasn’t built for audiophiles. The UI is really slick, and offers you a web interface you can use to control all your devices, so you can get to local or streamed content from your desktop, phone or tablet. I’ve been enjoying it so far: it’s intuitive, I can play music on any networked device with a web interface without having to install anything, and AirPlay just works - which is very pleasing. Have a look for yourself. You can download RaspyFi (currently v1.0) from the project website. Documentation, help and tutorials are all available too – let us know what you think! |
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
RaspyFi – a distro for music lovers
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