I got a Raspberry Pi 3 model B the other day. I have been thinking about getting one for a long time, but never got around it before now. I was growing tired of using my laptop as a media-player and the RP3 seemed a perfect solution.
I have always wanted to use it as a media-player, but the first couple of versions weren’t really up to it. They weren’t simply powerful enough to handle full HD movies or FLAC media files. With RP3 it’s totally different. It got more than enough juice to handle the above.
The setup
Actually this should be named “The setups” as I got 2 different setups, each running on a separate SD card. The first one is just a plain KODI install, used for playing movies. Nothing fancy and really easy to install and setup. I haven’t got my DAC to work with it yet, but shouldn’t be too hard to get working.
KODI plays just about any video format and there’s lots of different plugins you can install to furthere customize it. I toyed around a bit with Exodus, just to see what the fuzz was all about, however I’m not impressed by the GUI. Too many menus to get through, to get to the stuff you actually want to click or see.
Furthermore I’m not impressed by KODI’s setup for playing music. The interface is ugly, confusing and a pain to navigate with my enormous music collection. So I quickly dropped that and went with Volumio instead.
Volumio is a headless music player, meaning you just install it and then you control it with your browser or an app. No built-in interface / GUI whatsoever, just good ol’ command-line.
I placed some music on the SD-card to test it with. I can easily share the music I have on my PC with the PI, but I don’t want to turn on my PC whenever I want to listen to music. With that out of the way, I turned my attention to the GUI.
The web-GUI is very bare-bones, however I’m confident that it shouldn’t be too hard to customize if I ever want to go down that route.
I found the performance of the web-GUI decent on my PC, but pretty bad on my tablet. It was too sluggish and the delay was horrible. I looked around in the app-store for some official apps for Volumio, but none of them worked. However I found an app called MPDroid, which works like a charm. Fast, easy to use and navigate – and it worked instantly with Volumio.
The sound
My DAC worked straight out of the box with Volumio, which I didn’t expect. Bonus points for that.
The sound quality and level of detail was actually quite impressive – I didn’t do a thorough listening session, but for the 30 minutes I tested it, I played everything from EDM, to heavy metal to big epics with trumpets and string quartets. And it played it all without problem.
Final thoughts
So now I got a small video and music player. It can play just about anything and best of all it uses almost no power and it is completely silent. No more fans running when watching a movie or listening to music.
So if you want a cheap media player, I can only recommend the Raspberry Pi 3 model B.