Pi MusicBox + Iris for Spotify?

Pi MusicBox
1

Hello everyone. I have been reading along for some time now, but there are some questions I couldn’t find an answer to.
I am planning to set up a raspberry Pi + Allo Boss DAC 1.2 as a musicstreamer (connected to active Speakers). Almost all of my music comes from Spotify, so I was looking for the best spotify implementation possible. That’s how I found Mopidy.
Between all the available web front-ends I like Iris the best (sleek look, great Spotify integration, lots of ongoing development).
I am a total NOOB however, so there are some questions I couldn’t find the answer to (maybe they are answered somewhere, just not in words I could understand…).

  1. Is it possible to use Iris with Pi Musicbox? I read somewhere Iris needed Mopidy 2.0, which is not available through Musicbox?

  2. Is there any difference in sound quality between mopidy/musicbox and volumio for example?

  3. Does hardware volume control work with musicbox (and if so, how do you enable it to work with the dac/soundcard?)

  4. Which distro to use, if Iris is not compatible with MusicBox? I was leaning toward Dietpi, since there is the option to have it preinstalled by allo and it seems to be easy to install mopidy on it.

  5. Is it easy to implement hardware volume control on a system running dietpi + mopidy + iris?

  6. If you know any other way to accomplish what I descibed above using totally different software, let me know. I just came to the conclusion, that Mopidy is best for Spotify, but again: NOOB here :wink:

Thanks in advance! I cannot wait to set up my raspberry pi music system :slight_smile:

2
  1. Nope, not at this time. It requires a newer version of Mopidy than PiMusicbox currently supports
  2. I would argue not. But depends on your equipment and of course your ears. Some people have time and money to throw at this but it’s rapidly diminishing returns.
  3. Yes but you need to edit settings.ini manually. See https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-alsamixer/blob/master/README.rst#configuration
  4. I have no opinion/experience of this.
  5. See above
3

Thank you for the quick reply!
Do you know, when Iris will be supported by Musicbox (or a timeframe at least)?
Mopify does work with Musicbox, doesn’t it? Is Mopify still working with spotify (I heard spotify changed there api recently and mopify doesn’t seem to get any updates any more…)?

Thank you again. I am just starting out on this and really try to understand as much as possible, but it is kind of difficult to grasp sometimes :wink: