Rate changes are detected and adapted to, on the fly.
It is roughly as simple as it can be right now. Reason for the need to edit config.txt is that Holo Red and this RPi4 USB input cases need different configuration of the RPi4’s USB controller.
Once you have written the NAA OS image on microSD card, before booting it up, edit the config.txt on the boot partition. You can do this for example with Notepad on Windows. It is just a simple text file to edit.
There needs to be a comment marker ‘#’ at the beginning of either line depending on the use case. Having the line prefixed by ‘#’ makes the boot loader ignore it.
I believe editing the file is as simple as offering another copy of it.
No, not at least yet. On HQPlayer Desktop it is as simple as selecting the input from the list. But since Embedded supports having unlimited number of alternative inputs, local and remote, it is not that simple.
For this case, the specific values there depend on your system, since each NAA needs to have a unique name.
I’m happy to report that with latest HQPlayer Desktop v5 on macOS, automatic input rate switching also works through BlackHole, for example with Qobuz client!
The web interface recognizes the “new DAC” - but the streamer does not. My Windows laptop could not do anything with the USB input either: “Unknown application”.
…back from the easter family vacation. And many thanks to Stefano for the tip. And yes, Hao-Lai, that’s exactly how I had did my setup. I think my mistake was much more trivial: I had forgotten to click the “Select” button on the input page of the web interface.
Curious: The message “failed to connect” appeares - nevertheless “USB Audio gadjet” appeares on my DAC.
And it really works great! Even if it always jerks during auto rate switching for the first few bars - no matter… The streamer always runs the most of the time the redbook format anyway.
So it worked - and I’m very satisfied. Now I can control all my beloved radio stations, my CDs, my music files on the internal hard disk, on the NAS, roon and the Qobuz streaming via the streamer and the great Hqplayer.
Now I will make final comparisons with Qobuz streaming with Streamer, Roon and BubbleUPnP (so far the best performance with Hqplayer).
But now I can concentrate on the other tuning measures, such as cables and power supply.
No, there’s no Linux driver. It works with full proper automatic rate switching only on macOS so far (they have not yet fixed the Windows ASIO driver).
OTOH, on macOS automatic rate switching also works straight through the BlackHole loopback driver. So not sure how necessary this device is, unless one wants to use external sources with HQPlayer. And there it is quite nice since it has four optical inputs.
Now I am trying to connect to this NAA the following chain (which works perfectly when connected to HQP server directly): Blusound Node streamer → Toslink → miniDSP USBStreamer box → “USB B - USB C cable” → USB-C hub → USB C input - RPi4.
Selecting either RPi4 or USBStreamer 44/16 in drop down input menu, and clicking “Select” does not seem to pick up any stream.
I wonder where the possible break in the “line” can be?
This is pointing to a local RPi4 USB interface within the HQPlayer Embedded machine. Not to the remote NAA endpoint. So this is where it is going wrong. Instead it should be something like:
NAA address depends on the NAA hardware. It is not IP based, instead IP address can change as long as the NAA name remains the same. The auto-generated NAA name is kind of “hardware fingerprint” type, so it shouldn’t easily get changed for a particular piece of hardware.
So no, powercycling RPi4 won’t affect it. Nor software updates.
Unless they specifically say that it does support, I would very much assume it doesn’t. The earlier one I have doesn’t - it runs everything through ASRC…
Two months later… small dream is a reality and I have my CD’s spinned via HQPlayer with all its fat bells and whistles.
I have put together a small write-up on how I have connected my CD Transport to HQPlayer Embedded server using the “input NAA” features. I insert the link here in case someone comes around this topic (most likely so) with the similar question…
Can automatic rate switching be achieved when running Spotify or Amazon Music on Mac OS using Black Hole?
（If Spotify were to offer lossless audio in the future…
If it can do automatic rate switching, I’m really looking forward to the Mac mini M4 at the end of the year. Hopefully, it can handle DSD512.
