RoPieeeXL and hardware mixers

Audio Gear Talk RoPieee
1

Up until now I didn’t pay that much attention to mixer settings for services other then Roon.
Partly because I don’t use a DAC directly attached to the Pi myself, partly because I already knew that it won’t be fun.

This weekend however I finally did some digging with an Allo Boss DAC. This device supports hardware controlled volume and I (finally) got it working properly with Shairport-Sync and the new upcoming UPnP/DLNA stack.

RoPieee has always been about ease of use (“it is not a distribution but an appliance”), so obviously I’ve been trying to do this automagically.

And that… won’t work. The hardware mixer controls on Linux are a mess and it is not possible to do this completely automagically without user interfention.

So here’s the idea: we expose 1 basic mixer setting (per service): no mixer, software mixer or hardware mixer. If you select ‘hardware mixer’ you also need to select the correct mixer device. If you have a working setup (HAT & mixer settings) you report that back and I’ll add it to a white list. For all HAT’s on the whitelist we can then configure it automagically.

Does it make sense? Any feedback?

(oh. Do me a favour please: if you want to respond on this topic about another feature: don’t.)

2

Can we do the same for the IQAudIO dac/digiamp hats? I use the dac pro with rca and balanced out along with the pairing of digiamp hat for the dac pro and also use the digiamp+ amp hat.

Also have a zero dac. And allo kali+piano2.1 hat setup if that helps testing :upside_down_face:

3

I’m not sure if I understand you correctly. This is independent of a DAC HAT (at least: the manual part).

4

I thought you wanted a test group of dac/hats that are working with the existing platform…maybe I need to reread a few times :man_facepalming:

5

Is this just for ShairportSync and the DLNA server? I’ve noticed Roon doesn’t see a volume range for either of the two (USB) DACs I’ve tried on my one RoPieeeXL system. (Range seen by Roon is Min:0 Max:0.)

While I installed RoPieeeXL, 99.9% of my usage is via Roon.

6

I should mention maybe too I only use roon predominantly but also Spotify and airplay

7

This is not for USB DAC’s.

From what I’ve seen Roon is capable of detecting volume control quite good (I’m pretty sure they use a whitelist as well).

But for my understanding: you have a USB DAC with hardware volume control??

And for completeness: what do you do in Roon to ‘fix’ this?

And finally, to be clear: in the case of Roon there’s not something I can do. It’s basically a Roon show :wink:

8

Me as well :wink:

9

I have found no fix. For example, my Pro-Ject Digital S2 supports USB volume control. You can see this and fiddle with it using tools like alsamixer. But Roon doesn’t grok it, reports the Min and Max as both 0, and does nothing when set to Device Volume.

Just checked the SPL Phonitor xe, and it does not report USB volume support to the OS. So in that case, nothing to be done for it.

And understood that RoonBridge doesn’t give you any tweakables to configure.

10

Check.

But that’s up to Roon then :wink:
Let’s first (try to) fix the HAT’s with other services then Roon.

Thanks