Disclaimer: Blame @Jim_F It is all his fault! (tongue planted firmly in cheek)
A bit of background first. I’ve been using the Roon demo and then subscribed for a few weeks now, and using it with my own library of assorted quality of music files and a new subscription to Qobuz. Prior to Roon, I tolerated but used iTunes for local files and Spotify for streaming.
I’ve been vaguely aware of Raspberry Pi computers, but have never looked into them to see what they can do or how they work. I took “electronics” class in high school nearly 50 years ago, which has zero relevance to electronic devices today. I use a Mac because I’m not interested in fiddling with computers beyond using the applications. And my audio equipment is old, not very expensive, and I’m starting to lose hearing in upper frequencies.
So, probably the least likely to dive into this corner of the Roon Community, hence my thread title.
My Roon Core in on my iMac, where I listen in my office on the inbuilt speakers (yea, I know…) I also stream to a pair of Sonos One speakers in the kitchen/dining/living room area. My main listening area in our family room, where I have Roon installed on my MacBook Pro, using the optical output to a 16 year old Yamaha AV receiver. These all are controlled using the Macs and our iPads and iPhones.
In order to improve the quality of my listening experience, and to get the MacBook Pro out of the stream, I’ve ordered a Topping E30 DAC and intended to buy one of the spare RoPieee boxes that @Jim_F built and had on eBay. It’s no longer available, so I contacted Jim to see if he had any others. In an ongoing conversation, he convinced me that I could build and implement one myself, so here I am, and the reason for the tongue-in-cheek disclaimer. In actuality, Jim has been very helpful. Thank you, sir!!
I verified that Etcher will run on Mac OS, and downloaded it and the latest RoPieeeXL file. I ordered the following hardware from Amazon, which will supposedly arrive Thursday:
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
SanDisk 16GB Ultra MicroSCHC Card
Flirc Raspberry Pi 4 Case
CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 Power Supply
I have downloaded and started trying to grasp @Nathan_Wilkes excellent Beginners Guide Thank you Nathan for this resource. It seems very helpful from the viewpoint of a clueless beginner, and hopefully will help avoid the calamity I anticipate in my thread title.
I have a lot of reading to do until parts arrive. I’m sure that I will have questions and failures along the way. I plan to implement Airplay and Spotify Connect as well. I don’t know if I’ll turn on WiFi since the box will be wired directly to the switch hanging from my Eero mesh network’s gateway node.
I look forward to giving this a go, and to improved music quality in my family room. Thank you all in advanced for your patience in my getting to that point.
Steve
TL/DR: I’m gonna ask a lot of questions. And I’m gonna RTFM. Bear with me, please.