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Spotify Box

evanhailey.com

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Re: Spotify Box

#141

Post by stuntcoder »

antihero wrote: post #108
kristjansson wrote: post #87

Separating the internet-connected (and therefore low life-expectancy) bits from the analog sound-reproduction (and therefore expensive and high life-expectancy) bits is a great way to build a solid system that can grow and adapt over time. This is a super cool and gratifying way to deliver the internet-connected bit at low cost (at least for those with hardware inclination, and access to means of production). For tho…

Thing is, cool as this box is, this outputs analog and has DAC inside it. One of the key reasons that people wouldn't use Alexa input, Muso Cobblestone (these were pretty great in all fairness), etcetera long term is that the internal DACs were not even remotely "audiophile" quality. If these devices had some sort of digital output so we could attach our own DACs, it would be much nicer.

I use a raspberry pi running https://ropieee.org connected to a USB dac. I can play to it with Roon or Spotify. It's fairly plug-n-play

Re: Spotify Box

#142

Post by bjacobt »

smoldesu wrote: post #47
bjacobt wrote: post #43

As someone who is working on an embedded project - I just want to say, this is very impressive. I didn’t understand half of it, but you’ve given me enough to research. Not sure if this helps, but I’m paying $75 per hour to do bits of what you’ve have done here.

Just curious: which bits? If you're hemmed up on the sysops side, I've got you covered ;)

PCB design. Sorry what is sysops?

Re: Spotify Box

#143

Post by alias_neo »

modo_mario wrote: post #119
alias_neo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with Google Music for years, until the YouTube music fiasco then I jumped ship to Spotify. I found discovery excellent in Google but Spotify is horrible, it thinks I want to listen to Pop because I put a playlist of "top" or "charts" on while I work, when really I want rock/metal albums and can't discover them for the life of me.

Doesn't it have those made for you thingies that change weekly or so? In my case it makes em for the varying genres i listen to so even tho i listen to some techno at work i can pick a metal playlist with new stuff.

I noticed some mixes it makes but it has talk shows, podcasts etc thrown in and I'm really not into that.

Also, because it has basically ruined my music preferences, despite me telling it what I want to be recommended, it makes recommendations for "Dua Lipa" and "Doja Cat". Nothing against either of them, but not really what I was looking for.

Re: Spotify Box

#144

Post by micromacrofoot »

zorr wrote: post #86
micromacrofoot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandcamp really is a fantastic company. There are some barriers to listening to music on it directly (some intentional) but I've found so much great music through their recommendations. I still pay for streaming due to the convenience of typing most songs and playing it instantly... but if I like something enough to click the heart button I'll often hop over to Bandcamp to see if I can pay the artist more than the $.…

This is the way. I also use Spotify because it makes most of my music available instantly on all of my devices and the discovery is good enough. But that $150 for Spotify is only a small fraction of my yearly music spend. With most of it going to concert tickets, merch at concerts and merch/downloads on Bandcamp to support the artists I like. Spotify and Bandcamp are not mutually exclusive

Yeah exactly, and with covid making concerts uncomfortable for me for the foreseeable future I've just been doubling down on bandcamp and merch purchases (but wow I miss live music).

Re: Spotify Box

#145

Post by deeblering4 »

tyre wrote: post #48
deeblering4 wrote: post #3

If you are in the apple ecosystem an airport express provides a similar feature set (airplay to analog stero line out) and can output to multiple airports (in different rooms) simultaneously. Granted its not as headless. a iDevice (or airplay compatible source) needs to be running. I have analog stereos in a few rooms and the airport express provides a nice way for anyone in the house to cast music from whatever app…

One major issue is that Spotify for Mac doesn't work with AirPlay. It's confounding. They refuse to build it. Spotify has also refused to integrate with HomePod. The options are either stream all audio output, download something like AirFoil to stream only a single app (inconvenient, not friendly for non-technical users), or switch to Apple Music.

That's true, although for my purposes AirFoil has been worth the (admittedly too high) price. It also can output audio to bluetooth speakers and airplay devices at the same time, and has quite nice latency compensation built in.

Wish it was free, or better yet built into the OS, but it's a very useful piece of software.

Re: Spotify Box

#147

Post by smoldesu »

bjacobt wrote: post #142
smoldesu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious: which bits? If you're hemmed up on the sysops side, I've got you covered ;)

PCB design. Sorry what is sysops?

Sysops would be relating specifically to the software/OS side of things, answering questions like "how can we deploy a lightweight software experience that compliments our hardware experience?"

Only reason I bring this up is because I recently did a similar project for my family. You can salvage basically any old x86 board (or brand new, Linux-running ARM chip for that matter) and install a couple Linux daemons that enables it to act as a hyper-thin (total memory footprint under 250mb) Spotify client.

Lord knows how viable it would be to run on embedded hardware, but the current state of the Rust-based Spotify infrastructure looks very well maintained. In it's current state, I'd say the outlook is very good.

Re: Spotify Box

#148

Post by bayindirh »

jxcl wrote: post #140
bayindirh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but I’m not very knowledgeable about USB DACs which works on Linux. The HiFiBerry amplifier I use is $50, has great software and enough power and top notch DACs from TI. On top of that it’s a hat, has a dedicated steel enclosure and everything is powered by a laptop brick. It’s unbeatable at that price point IMHO.

I'm not sure about the specifics of the protocol but I've used tens of DACs and only ever run Linux, and I've never had a problem with compatibility. I'm pretty sure the USB audio standard is pervasive enough so that basically any DAC you buy will be compatible. On all the DACs I own I also have no trouble configuring the protocol to higher bandwidth settings like 24-bit 192 kHz signals.

That's good to hear. It's not that I believe that they won't work, but because I didn't need such setup. I use a desktop PC as my main battlestation and I use a Xonar D2X on that (over PCIe), and it works beautifully, so I didn't need anything else.

For the Raspberry Pi, I needed something tidy, like this box. My father gave his HiFi system to me due to space constraints, but kept a nice set of speakers, so I needed something comparable in clarity, in absolute smallest and sturdiest package. HiFiBerry allows me to do that.

Moreover the software is co-developed with Bang & Olufsen, and it's extremely polished, like the hardware itself. My setup is pretty lean, but HiFiBerry can do some serious stuff like B&O self-tuning and custom DSP filters for sound shaping (for room, for taste, for fun).

My setup is as follows:

- Raspberry Pi 4/2GB.

- HiFiBerry AMP2 [https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/boards/hifiberry-amp2/]

- Steel case for Pi4 + AMP2 [https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/cases/steel-case-for-hifiberr...]

The result is a literal black box with power in and speakers out. I added a SanDisk Fit USB drive for local music storage. It can run spotifyd, AirPlay 2, direct BT, local files and more. It packs a decent punch, runs cool, can be used from anywhere (runs a webapp on a server, advertised with mDNS). If there's an update, it installs and reboots automatically.

Set & Forget, at its finest.

Re: Spotify Box

#149

Post by bayindirh »

kesslern wrote: post #131
bayindirh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry Pi's analog audio out is not very high quality either. I run a HiFiBerry on a Raspberry Pi, and while it's really delicious to use (good sound, good app, good ergonomics), it's just mount, flash and play. It's not something you make from scratch. I'd love to have time to work on something similar. My targets would be different audio-quality wise, but it's a very nice project. Kudos to its maker.

I use a cheap USB audio device with my Pi. I got a constant buzz through my CRT with the built-in analog output. The USB device fixed that and all other audio issues I had.

These generally work well enough. My requirement was to drive a pair of HiFi speakers with minimum hardware, so I went for HifiBerry.

Re: Spotify Box

#150

Post by d1sxeyes »

wwn_se wrote: post #122
croon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know why they stopped selling chromecast audio (outside of wanting to sell more speakers I guess), but I have (and had) a bunch of those and bookshelf speakers with Lepai T Amps. It worked great. I've though since replaced most of them with Nest Audios, mostly for the WAF.

A hack is to use a regular chromecast and a hdmi to rca/spdif adapter/splitter. Works pretty well and you can get them pretty cheap (in the ballpark of $20). But it will be more expensive than the chromecast audio unfortunatley

A lot of those are really iffy in terms of quality - I had one which when run through my HiFi sounded like it was completely unshielded.
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