While searching for a solution for Squeezebox Lite problem, I came across this site on Github. Has anyone tried this build, please? The first build seems to date from 2022, and it is maintained.
Quote from the site:
“ArchQ is headless Arch Linux with a high-quality music server and player for audiophiles.
Powered by an optimized real-time kernel() frequency works on 441/396.9/352.8 kHz. Thus, you do not need to upsample your music files any more, even SQ is better than them. ArchQ includes the LMS, Roon (bridge), MPD(CD Play) and optimized Squeezelite & Airplay and CD ripper(abcde), and it’s easy to install and configure. If the CPU is more than 2 cores, LMS and squeezelite will work at isolated CPU.”
The fact that they have spelled the name wrong in the installer doesn’t give me much confidence.
Nonetheless, I think it is myth that audio playback needs a real-time kernel … in fact, performance is probably better without this as this doesn’t guarantee throughput of the system.
I’m really struggling to understand this, too.
Powered by optimized realtime kernel() frequency works on 441/396.9/352.8 KHz. Thus, you do not need to upsample your music files anymore …
CPU frequency has no bearing on the sample rate of media files.
Seems to be an attempt at solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
Always good to have choices, but I’ll stick with dietpi, I just set up another Squeezelite rpi based player this evening, with an old iqaudio dac plus hat I found in a drawer.
So easy to get all setup and be playing music in less than 20 min.
I’m no Linux expert, and I’m not much of an audiophile, but DietPi in low power mode on Pi 3’s has always sounded superb to me. Allo Boss DAC HAT is great. Dragonfly Red sounded noticeably better than when plugged into a Windows laptop. JDS Labs Objective didn’t sound noticeably different, probably because it has a separate linear power supply
That was me for a long time too. Most recently, I installed Raspberry Pi OS (minimal) on a 1 GB Raspberry Pi 4, and I’ve been super impressed. Great sound and flawless performance, even over Wi-Fi.
I paid just $35 for the board, so the same as what I used to pay for RPi 3 boards. No issues with heat like on the original RPi 4 boards.
On the topic of ArchQ, I’ve not tried it, but I do have another RPi 4 that runs AudioLinux (not free, I think I paid around $80). I wanted to try this as a replacement for VitOS for Raspberry Pi 4, which is no longer supported. Both are based on Arch Linux with a real-time kernel. This theory is that this reduces network and USB latency and that this somehow translates to better sound from an external DAC. I’ve not been able to verify the sound quality claims, but I did verify reduced network latency with VitOS.
I recently managed to get a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB with a Hifibery Digi2 Pro HAT using Audiolinux (on your recommendation) to run in “Ramroot” with the help of the wonderful Piero (who gives the best and fastest customer service I’ve ever had) and wow! Big, big sound improvement in my system. I’m running it into a PS Audio Directstream DAC (mkI). It’s far superior to the PS Audio Bridge II streamer card which I have now removed from the DAC. Do yourself a favor if yours is not running in RAM and try it.
How did you do this? After all, the network is asyncronous. Whilst a real-time kernel can guarantee the response time for a given process, this may be to the detriment of lower processes and I/O.
A real-time kernel provides the best worst case scenario. It does’t make things faster, and it certainly doesn’t reduce noise.
Yes, I can second that. Best sounding OS with Roon I’ve used yet. With a large Roon library you need a lot of RAM to run the whole OS in RAM but it is worth it.
