JRiver Media Center is a popular playback program for Windows and Mac. JRiver recently made a version of Media Center available for the Raspberry Pi, a small embedded computing platform. Combined with a U-DAC8, it makes a very compact and effective networked multichannel (and stereo) audio playback solution!
- 1. Getting Started
- 2. Setting up the U-DAC8
- 3. Setting up an audio library
- 4. Going headless
- 5. Limitations
- Wrapping Up
1. Getting Started [Top]
You will need a Raspberry Pi 3 and a miniDSP U-DAC8. Simply connect the USB cable from one of the Raspberry Pi's USB outputs to the U-DAC8 and connect the outputs of the U-DAC8 to your amplification and subwoofers, as shown in this diagram:
Install the full distribution of the Raspbian operating system on an SD card. You can find downloads and instructions here:
Connect a monitor or TV via HDMI and a keyboard and mouse to the USB ports, then insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi's SD card slot and power it on. You can then install JRiver Media Center by following these instructions:
2. Setting up the U-DAC8[Top]
Start up JRiver Media Center (JRMC) on the Raspberry Pi - drop down the Raspberry menu, go to "Sound and Media," and select "JRiver Media Center."
In JRMC, drop down the Player menu and select Playback Options. Click on the Audio Device, scroll down and select "surround71:CARD=UDAC8,DEV=0 [ALSA]".
To use bass management or to have JRiver "upmix" stereo content to 5.1 outputs:
- Drop down the Player menu and select DSP Studio.
- Click on the Output Format item in the list on the left. (Make sure you turn on the checkbox to enable it.)
- For Channels over on the right, drop down the menu and select "5.1 Channels."
To set up bass management, click on the Room Correction item in the left (turn on the checkbox), and proceed through each speaker to set up the crossover to the subwoofer. Here is a typical example:
(If necessary, you can adjust levels and delays on this screen as well.) And that's it! Now set up an audio library.
3. Setting up an audio library[Top]
You can attach a hard drive containing music files directly to the Raspberry Pi. (It's best if it's a powered drive, as the Raspberry Pi won't supply a lot of power over USB.) You can even just plug in a USB stick containing music files. Use the JRiver documentation for setting up a library:
Once you've done that, browse to the album view, select an album, and click "Play"! Here's how it looks when we set up a small library of multichannel test tracks (from 2L of Norway):
Alternatively, if you have your library on a network drive, you can simply mount that drive on the Raspberry Pi. Follow these instructions to mount a network drive (assuming that your NAS supports SMB):
Then you can simply do the same as above for an attached drive, but browse to the location that you mounted the network drive. (Note: if you have difficulty with the network drive not mounting on boot, add the following to the options in fstab (right after "iocharset=utf8"): ,_netdev,x-systemd.automount).
4. Going headless[Top]
If you don't want to leave a screen, keyboard and mouse attached to the Raspberry Pi, you can make it "headless." Follow these instructions:
With that done, you can connect to the Raspberry Pi 3 with a remote desktop. However, you will most likely also want to install JRemote on your iPad or your Android tablet. Here's how it looks with our multichannel test library:
5. Limitations[Top]
Here are some limitations to be aware of:
- This app note is relevant to audio source files (e.g. FLAC format) only. The Raspberry Pi may not have the CPU power to decode video in JRiver Media Center.
- The Raspberry Pi does not have enough CPU power to transcode multichannel DSD into PCM. So: this setup is only for multichannel PCM audio files (e.g. FLAC).
Please note also that miniDSP cannot provide support for third-party hardware or software. While this app note showed you how to set up the miniDSP U-DAC8 with JRiver Media Center running on a Raspberry Pi 3, the features and functions of this hardware and software are beyond the scope of miniDSP support.
Wrapping up[Top]
That's it for this app note! If you want to try some multichannel audio files, you can download samples from 2L of Norway.
Have fun, and please let us know about your Raspberry Pi experience in our forum.
