Tag Archives: audio

Hi-Fi Audio Center with RuneAudio and RaspberryPi A+

For quite a long time, I had a RaspberryPi A+ just laying around and doing practically nothing. Every now and then I used it for some testing and occasionally playing around with the Unicorn HAT, but overall, because of the lack of connectivity and performance limitations, it remained heavily unused.

Then one day, I stumbled upon rpiMusicPlayer.com and I liked every aspect of the software and the concept behind it. Having a miniature audio center at my apartment which can connect to my music library and be able to accept music streaming, was a great idea. So I decided: my A+ will finally meet the reason it was created for.

The procedure for getting the whole thing is rather forward, but can be bumpy based on the equipment you have.

  1. Acquire a RaspberryPi A+ with a microSD card (preferably class 10, 8GB) and an adequate power source
  2. Think of how you want to connect the rasberry pi to your home network. The A+ doesn’t have an ethernet port, so if you want wired connection, get a USB to ethernet adapter. If not, do what I did, and get a wi-fi dongle. I used Tenda Pico wireless adapter. It was one of the supported adapters at the official RaspberryPi documentation site, and it hasn’t caused me any troubles before. Also, it’s rather cheap.
  3. Download the image for the rasbperry pi based software.
  4. Follow the steps for flashing the SD card with the image.
  5. Connect everything.

Now, if you have an usb to ethernet adapter, I suppose everything should work right off, if your router has DHCP enabled.

If however you use Wi-Fi for connectivity, the procedure is a bit more complicated, since the A+ has only one USB port and it will be used by the Wi-Fi dongle.

There are two possible ways of handling this:

  1. Try to connect a self-powered USB hub and attach the dongle + usb keyboard to it. Then, through the console, try to configure the Wi-Fi connection by using wifi-menu. Some details here. The username is ‘root’ and password is ‘rune’
    This however, regardless of how simple it seems, I failed to configure. Therefore:
  2. Get a B+, connect it to your router (or crossover to a computer) via ethernet and plugin the wi-fi dongle. Boot everything, and wait enough time (around 1-2 minutes) for the software to start. Then, from a computer on the same network, try to open http://runeaudio.local/ in your browser. If that fails, then seek for the IP address in your router (the hostname is runeaudio) and try with it (e.g. In the menu open network and configure your wireless connection (http://runeaudio.local/network/). Next, shutdown the system via the UI and poweroff your B+. Eject the SD card, insert it in the A+, move the Wi-Fi dongle to the USB port as well and power the device on. If everything is OK, you should be able to access the system at runeaudio.local.

At this point, runeaudio will use the audio jack on the A+ to render the music at. However, this is not the perfect option since the Digital to Analog converter there is possibly trivial. Therefore, you might think of acquiring an external DAC which will improve the overall quality. Some of the supported DACs are listed in the homepage of the project. Bear in mind, that the DAC will add no value if you use cheap RCA cables or low-end audio system.

I used HiFiBerry DAC+ with RCA connectors. The price is fine and the shipment was quite fast. In order to configure runeaudio to use the external DAC, simply open the web UI, go to settings and choose your device from the listed I2C kernel modules. It will require a reboot which is not a problem. Then, open the web UI again, go to MPD and choose the Audio output interface to be the DAC you’ve just configured.

Sweet, sweet sound (RasPi A+ with HiFiBerry DAC+ running on RuneAudio)

After installing and getting the whole thing up and running, you can resume on with configuring it.

RuneAudio has a pretty nice web UI which will allow you to do everything you need. By now, I haven’t got to the point where I need to access the device via SSH and do some manual config.

Out of music sources, you can add several. I would just mention shared network libraries, AirPlay, dlna and spotify.

RuneAudio WebUI
RuneAudio WebUI

As a conclusion, I must say I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome of this project. I’m mainly using it via AirPlay and so far it hasn’t caused me any troubles, regardless that it is connected solely by a cheap Wireless g USB dongle.

There might be some situations where the web UI will be non responding, some settings will not be saved from the first time or the loading spinner will not disappear (often happening during active air play stream). Besides that, the entire system is a rather cheap but effective, high-quality and most importantly, very usable.