6c8c2d3c

PID: SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
XPost: uk.rec.audio

A few weeks ago I described a music source I put together:

* Raspberry Pi
* Raspberry Pi 7" touch screen
* Volumio software 
* Allo Boss DAC 
* music stored on a 64GB USB flash drive

(played through a 30-year-old Cyrus 1 amplifier to Royd Coniston 2
speakers).

I've been using this for a few weeks, and listening to a variety of
music on it.

The sound quality is excellent, especially given the price of the
Raspberry Pi hardware. I can recommend the Allo Boss DAC in particular.

The Volumio software - well, it works. But the interface is very rough,
in all kinds of ways.

In just about every music transport interface since the dawn of the CD,
hitting the "back" button in the middle of a track sends you back to its
start; in Volumio, it sends you to the start of the previous track.

Navigation through a music library is tiresome, and it's very difficult
to do basic things, like play an album starting with a particular track.

I'm going to try something else instead, but I don't think the other
options are significantly better.

The Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen in hopeless. When you wake it from
sleep, it registers the touch that wakes it as a command, so inevitably
you skip a track or worse. It's slow and unresponsive, and has no scroll
momentum behaviour, so it's clumsy to use (that's mostly the Raspberry
Pi's fault though). And the pixels aren't square, which is aesthetically
displeasing.

I mostly found myself controlling it via a web browser, which was not
nearly as irritating as I expected. Still, I think I will find some way
of setting up proper hardware controls on it, because jabbing at a phone
or having to go to my MacBook is no way to control what's playing.

Daniele

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05