Hi all
I’ve just manually updated Hifiberry’s Roon image to ver 1.3 on the microSD card.
Did everyone else’s HiFiberry product update automatically from 1.04 to 1.3?
Even after a reboot mine didn’t.
I’ve done the manual update so it’s fine but I thought it was self updating since ver 1.0.4?
Much appreciated
I’ve never seen auto-update behaviour with the HiFiberry images (or with IQaudIO’s images for that matter). I’m inclined to think that Roon Ready images from these hardware suppliers don’t auto-update. Only the Roon Bridge images (from Roon Labs themselves) seem to do this.
Mine not only didn’t update but when I manually updated it…flashed a new image it was no longer recognized by Roon Core. After a couple of attempts I lost interest and used DietPi instead.
They did claim that it would automatically update the software here:
https://www.hifiberry.com/blog/new-roon-for-hifiberry-release/
I believe mine hasn’t.
I’ve had the same behaviour when installing the hifiberry roon image on a new device. There is a bug in recognizing the right board.
The solution is here: Roon Does Not Recognize My New Pi
Thanks mate, this is what I was referring to in my OP when I said it’s supposed to be self updating.
Looks like many of us haven’t had that working though. I may jump on the Hifiberry forum and flag it.
I’m lucky that my old Digi+ and new PRO that arrived yesterday were all able to be manually updated to 1.3 without issues and both working fine.
If I had to start messing with config files I would most likely start crying lol
Mine is running without doing any manual updates. Would I notice anything if I loaded a new image?
I don’t know what’s been updated. I can’t find release notes. I was never having issues with 1.0.4 but updated to 1.3 anyway. Maybe shoot Daniel at Hifiberry an email?
After ordering some more pie for some more multiroom goodness, I just updated the HifiBerry-Image manually to 1.3. Did someone contact HifiBerry over the auto update? Did someone try to log into the image?
(see here: Roon's armv7hf image or HiFiberry's Roon image)
I don’t understand the purpose of the official hifiberry image. It is bloated to the extreme, doesn’t seem to deliver anything special and when questioning the hifiberry Tech support team about it, they prefer to threaten removal of your account than utilise normal customer service behaviours. My experience was so bad I’d think twice before recommending the brand again. And certainly won’t bother buying one with better alternatives out there. To this end, I suspect their skill-set in *nix craft is a bit limited.
In the meantime, I switched to DietPi, never to look back.
And what do you consider the better alternatives?
Don’t forget HifiBerry were among the first developing audio HATs and have contributed a lot to the Pi audio stack as we know it today. Competing boards used to ‘just use’ HifiBerry’s drivers – only in the last year or so other interesting boards have come to market.
While DietPi (or any other well tuned minimal Linux install) may be the better option technically, not every audio enthousiast feels inclined to mess around in a terminal window. For them, a RoonReady image is a neat turn-key solution: just flash and insert your card and off you go, with your HAT autodetected and device settings already optimised.
I applaud them for taking the road to RoonReady certification, even though their image may not be for you (or for me).
I for one am very happy to have the Hifiberry image. I haven’t even checked whether it is bloated or not (like some people claim), nor do I care. Tweaking the platform is not really my favourite thing to do. I do these things for a living and at home I’d rather just have something that is ready to be used. Also I like the vector graphics, so there’s that 
But that’s just me. If someone finds joy in tweaking, then by all means tweak.
Actually that’s one of my points. You can’t actually tweak the hifiberry image (without extreme difficulty), which by the way is about 1.5GB in size compared with the approximate 0.1GB some others are that do the same thing. I don’t care about the size but it does tend to show the ability of the Linux skills.
Anyway, back to tweaking, you can’t tweak the hifiberry image because they’ve locked it down. Remember though, its a raspberry pi which in itself is a platform for tweaking. And by nature the hifi berry add on board is also, well a tweak. So locking the software goes against the community its designed for really.
Anyway, some will like it and that’s cool. Not for me though I don’t see any value. And clearly it doesn’t auto update like its meant to, meanwhile the custom made versions DO auto update. So I don’t understand that point either. So again, what is the purpose of the image? I must be missing something.
Even though Raspberry Pi might be a platform for tweaking and even if you consider the add-on hardware a tweak, it does not mean that you can’t make something that’s ready with it. I would not even use Raspberry Pi with Roon if it meant I had to be tweaking it all the time.
As for the size of the image, it really means nothing. It’s roughly 400MB compressed which tells that most of that 1.5GB is empty space, they just made an image of the partition they used to create the image.
Of course that is a problem if you are using a sd card that is smaller than 1.5GB but who is? 8GB (even 16GB) cards cost basically nothing and smaller cards (if you can find them) are slow and at least as expensive as 8GB cards. I have no reason to get the smallest possible card to install the smallest possible image in order to tweak as much as I can. Not for me. It is by no means the best use of my time and money.
The auto update didn’t work and I have no idea if it does now. But it’s a shame if it doesn’t. Still, it works for playing music and I’ve been mostly spending my time listening to music instead of tweaking, so it hasn’t been a blocker so far.
I remember reading somewhere that the image can be accessed now (user: pi / password: hifiberry). Did not test it though, as I am using a different image…