I don’t know if it is oke to start this topic. But as a new musicbox wannabee i am curious to the hardware setup users here a using.
As i can see al raspberry models are supported, different audio cards and wired or wireless. But what is your setup and how is it performing.
Is the performance on a raspberry a just as good as on the newest raspberry? Which kind of speakers are you using? How is your wireless performance and which wlan card do you use?
Hope that with this topic a database is created which contains succesfull hardware setups other people can make use of it.
No, Raspberry Pi 2 B is about six times faster than Raspberry Pi 1 A/A+/B/B+. There is no A edition of Raspberry Pi 2 yet, and IIRC there won’t be one in the near future either. Thus, I guess Raspberry Pi 2 B is now the obvious choice for the computer itself.
correct me if I’m wrong but wont raspberry pi 2 running MusicBox be using 1/10th of the avaiable ram and cpu power? do you really need all of those resources?
I think that is because of what “top” outputs when it is being used, and that the UI feels fast, almost imediate on my A+ (256 Mb RAM). Of course, maybe search and library scan would be quicker. But then again, for most users, how much of their time using the device will they be scanning or searching? Maybe less then 3%? Most of the time the device will be playing music, which I understand is not very resource intensive in itself. This is why I though that it might be the case that a Pi2 in away could be considered overkill for a situation where nothing else is intended to be done except running PiMusicBox.
But, then again, if considering which one to get, one might also consider taking into account their prices, and it is true that this price difference is small.
I agree that scanning time is not interesting (and arguably IO limited
anyway) but I can assure it’s noticeably faster when interacting with it,
which is what matters. If you prefer MPD clients it’s more noticeable. Most
of the time the cpu usage is reasonable but there are plenty of situations
where it spikes and that’s when you notice it and that’s what sticks in
your mind when deciding to use it or not.
There’s also the option of running other background services which I know
some people do. If/when we do add any extra services to musicbox it’ll be
possible to turn them off, just like you can do with upnp and airplay, so
we keep things responsive on the model A. It’s great to hear you find it
responsive.
And as you say, the price makes the decision pretty irrelevant.
I have a pi 2 (in addition) but I have not tried PiMusicBox on it yet. I have used Gnome music, Sonata and the Webclient to control the PMB the A+ and I’d say that they are not slow. So I think that (at least at this moment) the software will by quite usable on any RPi. In the case that some one is considering which model to buy now, probably in situations where you need lower energy consumption or lower weight the A+ might be better, but otherwise one should always choose model 2
To answer some of the other questions in the OP. I have noticed that all of these small usb wifi adapters show alot of excessivre retries and invalid miscs (iwconfig) in areas with many other interfering devices. This does not appear to be a problem, however, and the retries can be lowerred by setting
iwconfig wlan0 retry 30
I don’t know if using a DAC is really necessary, but you can definetly notice the difference. But naturally, in some sense, the whole will be as good as its weakest link. So, while a Rpi with a dac and high resolution audio can be “HIFI”, does it matter if your speakers are of low quality?