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Author Topic: Will MC work for a Rasberry Pi based media player?  (Read 2474 times)

baldo

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Will MC work for a Rasberry Pi based media player?
« on: March 22, 2019, 04:55:46 am »

I am thinking about building a Rasberry Pi based music player and was wondering if the Linux version of MC will work with it?

At the moment I have MC running on 3 separate machines: a Mac, a windows 10 laptop and a Windows 7 PC.  Every so often I will clone the MC library from one of machines and then restore that version onto the other machines.  I am happy with this approach.

I now want to build a dedicated media player. So it will read the data from the hard drive send the audio to a hi end DAC and then be played through my sound system.

A Rasberry Pi machine could do the job and I would like to stay with MC as my front end software library management and audio engine tool.

Any thoughts?

Many thanks.
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Awesome Donkey

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Re: Will MC work for a Rasberry Pi based media player?
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2019, 05:00:58 am »

JRiver Media Center works fine on a Raspberry Pi. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ running Raspbian Stretch and MC25, which manages my music library on my NAS for streaming to devices.

There's a couple caveats to be aware of though...

1) If you're planning on using MC for video, the Pi is TERRIBLE for that. It's too weak to handle video (or MC's Theater View, for that matter).

2) If you've got DSD files and plan on doing any conversion to PCM, the Pi is also too weak to handle this on-the-fly. You can bitstream DSD through MC running on a Pi, but any type of conversion to or from DSD won't work too well.

If you're just using normal PCM files (FLAC, APE, ALAC, etc.) it'll work nicely. I'd just recommend trying it and see how it does. :)
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Windows 11 24H2 Update 64-bit + Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole 64-bit | Windows 11 24H2 Update 64-bit (Intel N305 Fanless NUC 16GB RAM/500GB M.2 NVMe SSD)
JRiver Media Center 33 (Windows + Linux) | iFi ZEN DAC 3 | JBL 306P MkII Studio Monitors | Audio-Technica ATH-M50x Headphones

baldo

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Re: Will MC work for a Rasberry Pi based media player?
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2019, 05:12:51 am »

WOW, that was fast!!!! Thanks.

I use mainly FLAC and M4A files at the moment with some WAV and AIFF files.  I have no interest in using the RPi for video.  IT will be predominantly and audio only device.

I am not too clear what you mean by DSD files....

And what do you mean by PCM conversion?  I will have an external Hi End DAC (RME DAC) that will deal with converting the audio signal from digital to analogue audio which will then be sent to the pre- amp etc.

I assume that with an external DAC the conversion will be dealt with by the DAC and not by the RPi processor.

The only thing the Rpi will have to go is run MC Linux on top of the OS for the RPi, access the files from the USB hard drive and then send them to the DAC for conversion to analogue audio to then be amplified.
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Awesome Donkey

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Re: Will MC work for a Rasberry Pi based media player?
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2019, 05:22:52 am »

Well, if you don't know what DSD files are, then you probably don't have to worry about it. :D

Some people take DSD files and convert them to PCM, but since you're not dealing with DSD files, there's no issue for you there. Sounds like you can proceed if you desire. Good luck! :)
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I don't work for JRiver... I help keep the forums safe from "male enhancements" and other sources of sketchy pharmaceuticals.

Windows 11 24H2 Update 64-bit + Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole 64-bit | Windows 11 24H2 Update 64-bit (Intel N305 Fanless NUC 16GB RAM/500GB M.2 NVMe SSD)
JRiver Media Center 33 (Windows + Linux) | iFi ZEN DAC 3 | JBL 306P MkII Studio Monitors | Audio-Technica ATH-M50x Headphones
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