DietPi: creating a lean-and-mean Roon Bridge

Just tried out my fresh NanoPi Neo with DietPi. Excellent performance with my USB DAC to its maximum of DSD 128.
Amazing small package and all you need.

I Highly recommend it!!

Regards,
Jelle

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We’ve had a couple power outages the last two days and if the pi boots back up before the router, the wifi doesn’t connect. Is there a workaround for this outside of manually rebooting the pi once the network is back up?

Ups for the router

.Hi Dan, Bill here. I have Roon up and running (Roon Server on my laptop/ Roon Bridge on my Rasberry Pi 3) thanks to you. I have a question though. Which of the two is the actual music player, the Server on my laptop or the bridge on my Rasberry? If on my Rasberry, is it a Linux based player? If my laptop is the player, shouldn’t I use the program called Fidelizer to shut down unessential programs and services on my laptop so that it doesn’t have anything running that could degrade the sound quality? I used Fidelizer when I was using JRIVER as my laptop music player before I installed the Roon trial.
Thanks Dan,
Bill

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I’ll answer if I may. The Pi is the interface with the DAC so although the core is the music player it is the environment of the Roon Bridge that will have the biggest impact on SQ. That said, I run Fidelizer on my core because it doesn’t really do any harm! Bridge is an Odroid C2 or Beaglebone Black or Green.

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Hi Bill,

So in simple terms, we can think of your laptop as a music player, but instead of outputting the audio to your laptop soundcard, it sends the digital audio data directly to the Raspberry Pi.
Loss of audio quality would only be at the point the Raspberry Pi converts the digital audio data, into analogue output.

Imagine your laptop running Roon is a CD reader. It reads the digital data on the CD, then sends that digital data directly to the Raspberry Pi.

Roon on your laptop will chop up the data, and send it in its own way, however, the digital audio data contained within it, is untouched (AFAIK), until it reaches the Raspberry Pi and is converted to audio output.

If my laptop is the player, shouldn’t I use the program called Fidelizer to shut down unessential programs and services on my laptop so that it doesn’t have anything running that could degrade the sound quality?

Terminating unnecessary programs on the laptop may help with performance, however, I do not believe it will make a difference to sound quality, unless you start experiencing stuttering playback.

Some advanced stuff:
The only possible loss of quality I can see on the laptop, is when using re-sampling in Roon, then floating point precision on your CPU is being relied on. Ideally, the best way to achieve the highest quality of float precision, is ensure your CPU has a stable power supply and clean power provided by the motherboard.
Regardless, with floats, we are talking the difference between something being 0.000000 and 0.000001

In C++, we have an option to compile a program to force a higher floating point precision, this is great, but also reduces the performance of all floating point calculations. The Roon guys probably do something similar already, putting audio quality before performance.

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Thanks again Dan. Just one last question to clarify my thoughts. Is my Rasberry, with Roon Bridge installed, still a Linux based computer?

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Yes, albeit an extremely efficient, low power, low noise one.

Consider that by the same definition, any RoonReady endpoint (say a microRendu or Bluesound Node) is a computer as well.

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Hi there,

I’m enjoying a Raspberry Pi 3 running DietPi (roon bridge, spotify connect and shairport) along with a HifiBerry Dac+ HAT. The Pi is connetcted via ethernet. Everything works as intended but everytime I want to start playing something of either these sources in the morning (read: after a longer period of doing nothing) the Pi won’t react.

I have to unplug it and plug it in again in order to reboot and after doing this two or three times it will be discovered. After that ealy morning treatment, everthing is back to normal
 Any ideas how to keep this thing running?

Symptoms: the little green LED of the HifiBerry Dac+ is off, so maybe this is some kind of standby mode of some sort?

Thanks

Can you try a different PSU? And, have you shut down the WLAN config on the Pi3?

Hi,

Apologies for the delay, M3 USB DAC support will be fixed in DietPi v146 update. We had to recompile M3 kernel and enable additional modules:

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I need some help after a bad stuff up. Diet Pi installed rpi3 - optimised for low noise which turns off hdmi at boot. Installed hifi berry digi+ for coax but cannot use screen to configure sound card (didn’t auto recognise)
Ok so tried to ssh in but dietpi password gets me access denied (no haven’t changed password). Any way out or a fresh install ?

When logging in, did you use ‘root’ as username (as opposed to regular Raspbian, which uses ‘pi’)?

I’m not great at Linux - when ssh from terminal on mac : ssh pi@(ip address) I get password and key symbol - typed dietpi - permission denied. Same with root

For DietPI, the correct login is ‘ssh root@ip-address’, followed by ‘dietpi’ at the password prompt.

You are a bloody genius ! I’m in !

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Have fun! (And while you’re in there – change the password. :-)).

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Rene I love you and I want to have your babies. Card configured and sounds just wonderful. That’s several times you have saved me from tearing my hair out. Password changed !! :open_mouth:

I have followed Rene Bouwmeester’s instructions elsewhere on this site successfully to create six Roon Bridges at home with Raspberry Pi 3s running Raspbian Jessie Lite. Can someone explain the differences / advantages / disadvantages of DietPi over the version I have adopted to date? Thanks. JCR

First off: if it works, it works. But those instructions were written in the (very) early days of Roon Bridge for ARM. I’m currently rewriting the guide for an even easier installation, based on DietPi.

You can find a few of the advantages of DietPi here:

Since then, Roon Bridge has been added to the easy, menu-driven installer, making for a very simple and straightforward install.

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