Hi - no more iTunes pain

Hi all,

I’ve been a audiophile since the 80s. Today I can’t afford to be in that club any more - high end audio has become stupid expensive.

Anyway, I bought an iMac in 06 just to be a music server, ripped my 400+ CDs to ALAC, and was very happy using Front Row as a UI. In the beginning I ran it via TOSLINK to my AVR (which did not sound awesome). Later I made up a strictly music system: the iMac, a Benchmark DAC, an Onix SP3 Tube amp and a variety of speakers over time.

The iMac died this year. But my troubles started even before then:

  • Front Row was discontinued in the newer OSX versions.
  • iTunes kept getting worse and worse with picking the correct ID3 tag and album art.
    And when I fixed them, they would magically revert to the original wrong version!
  • Apple doesn’t even make a mac I’d want for a music server today.

So I decided to try a Pi, and that led me to Volumio as a distro. The UI is pretty (that shows its Italian design), it basically does want I want out of the box (bit-perfect, fairly cheap, very flexible, worked with ALAC). I first used it with a Dragonfly Black that I already had. Then I bought a PiFi Digi+ HAT to use with my Benchmark DAC. I was hoping to use the PiFi’s IR receiver with one of my 3 Apple remotes, but the IR seems dead (yup, /boot/config.txt has: dtoverlay=lirc-rpi:gpio_in_pin=26). That’s for another posting though.

Cheers

Hi HoleyGrail,

welcome to Volumio & the forums :slight_smile:.