Apologies for the slight bump–accidentally hit enter at time of posting.
RoPieee XL seems to work fine with Spotify Connect.
It’s connected via a USB DAC (Apple dongle), which is then connected using a USB-A to USB-C converter.
What happens is pretty peculiar: I attempt to pair the device with AirPlay. It seemingly works, but no audio is played.
Eventually, after a few minutes, it hits me with the message that it “failed to connect to AirPlay”.
After doing these steps, I can no longer use either Spotify Connect OR AirPlay until RoPieee is restarted.
I am really not sure what’s going wrong in the signal chain, so I was hoping the logs could reveal more information.
The DAC shows your DAC cannot handle 44.1k. And the content you stream is that.
Can you try something at 48k?
Not sure if I will be able to. I think AirPlay is hard-capped to 44.1k. Regardless, I’m not quite sure how to manually adjust the khz streaming rate for AirPlay specifically. I thought Apple Music would be lossless, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
It would surprise me if this DAC isn’t capable of 44.1k–after all, it is just an Apple USB-C to 3.5mm.
This behavior is pretty interesting though. Does that imply that Spotify is streaming at 48k?
Apple Music can stream lossless from an iPhone and high resolution lossless with an attached DAC. Airplay is restricted to 44.1 I believe.
Spotify can adjust and probably resamples.
Can you try another DAC?
Sure. After plugging in the Motu M2, it works.
I suppose there are issues with the Apple USB-C dongle/DAC (or maybe an issue with the USB-A to USB-C connection, but I sincerely doubt this hypothesis and lack any other equipment to test with). (After further research, it appears I’m not the only one who’s ran into this exact issue: RoopieXL with Apple USB-C DAC - #5 by Daniel_Zacarias)
Not sure if there’s anything left on RoPieee’s side then, since I assume this issue would be with shairport-sync and not RoPieee XL.
[EDIT: For those reading in the far future (6+ months from now), this issue may be obsolete. Following this GitHub issue: Apple DAC fails w/ *fatal error: The output DAC can not be set to 44100 frames per second · Issue #1504 · mikebrady/shairport-sync · GitHub, it directs to a bug report for ALSA: 217501 – Apple USB-C 3.5mm dongle cannot output 41000hz. It appears to be selecting a BADD config instead of the UAC3 config, both of which are present. You could, theoretically, use usb_modeswitch -v to change the configuration manually to #3, which is the UAC3 config (that properly supports 44.1khz). Theoretically, the RoPieee XL creator could attempt to insert the udev rule listed in the GitHub config, which could resolve the issue, but that’s a risk and reward assessment left for the creator to decide. I wouldn’t mind testing such firmware though.]
Any recommended DACs around $10?
not aware of any other $10 dac worth recommending … this usb dac is about $30 and has worked ok for me … also has optical out
hope the 44.1kHz issue with the apple dongle on linux gets resolved soon (i also have one of these and had planned to try it with a Pi once I got a usb-a to c adapter for it)
That is pretty disappointing to hear, but I suppose not terribly surprising, given the power of economies of scale.
I suppose I’ll just deal with only having Spotify Connect for now (even though it sounds worse than AirPlay somehow). In the meantime, I suppose I’ll keep the RoPieee XL in a separate SD card until these beta fixes come up and play with Rapsbian + Shairport-Sync.
Is there any way I can manually touch the OS’s file system?