Audio player

What if you have a collection of music CDs and your CD player is slowly dying, plus you want to keep a local music library and not switch to streaming entirely? Copy the music to files and build a modern audio player:

Enter moOde Audio on Raspberry Pi. Here is the setup:

A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, with a HiFiBerry DAC+. The audio signal is then amplified by a tiny 2x3W class D (PAM8403A) amp. All of these run on 5V, but the amp needs its own separate power supply in order to avoid nasty ground loop issues. Music files (I prefer lossless FLAC) are stored on a USB stick which moOde detects and mounts automatically, and then also presents as Samba share. (Since the Pi Zero only has one Micro USB port, I had to make a USB OTG adapter, in order to be able to plug in the USB memory device.) Apart from local music files, moOde Audio happily plays other sources: A vast selection of Internet radio stations comes pre-installed, plus you can stream music via Bluetooth, AirPlay, Spotify Connect, etc.

To control moOde, you simply connect to the player from any browser in the local network. So I found a new use for an old (4th generation) iPad that was lying around with me, and mounted it above the other components.

You can download moOde here, and create an image to install on the Raspberry as usual. moOde is updated frequently and support in their forum is great.

Thanks to Yaler.net, who provide a cloud relay, I have SSH access to the Raspberry Pi even though it's behind a router firewall. This allows me to remotely update the system, maintain the music library, and much more :)

Now on to ripping more music CDs to FLAC files, on my 2009 Mac Pro, using X Lossless Decoder (XLD), and then MusicBrainz Picard to fix metadata.