After testing and confirming a working process of setting up headless plexamp on a Pi3, I picked up a Pi5 and followed the same exact process.
But I cannot get it to play at all.
To recap, I followed the installation process on this link:
I was advised on another thread to make changes that were listed on another link to configure things relating to the hdmi output, since that is the output I was trying to get to work.
open ~/boot/firmware/config.txt
add these lines:
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_force_edid_audio=1
hdmi_drive=2
change this line
dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
to
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
save the file and reboot the system.
Despite this working on the Pi3, on the Pi5, when I go into the playback settings, the audio output is set to default, and the only audio output option is default. No other options, no hdmi options, and nothing will even attempt to try to play.
Have you selected HDMI as the audio output in raspi-config? Run sudo raspi-config from the command-line. Select System Options → Audio and then select your HDMI output.
When making the correction that works for the Pi3, no audio options show in raspi-config.
When reversing the correction, hdmi shows up, but it doesn’t work - same problem I had in the Pi3 before making the corrections.
It seems that Pis are configured with audio options that don’t work, I don’t understand what they designed the HDMI ports to do, but they don’t work with anything practical out of box it seems.
Digging a bit with the help of AI, I’m at a point of playing around with pulseaudio to get the hdmi to work, and have had mixed results with command line tests, but haven’t gotten to the point of playing with plexamp.
I’m confused why plexamp wasn’t design to work out of box, or why there isn’t a better defined setup process for it at this point. There really needs to be some work done in that department.
there might be an issue with how headless is saving the audio device name locally on the pi … it’s being saved as “hw:x,y” (which works for most audio devices), but hdmi might need a different naming convention (“hdmi:x,y”) ?
It feels like headless plexamp wasn’t designed with Pi in mind. Which I find odd, it seems to me like the obvious - but perhaps I’m missing something. What was headless plexamp meant to work with?
it works great on a pi with most audio devices, i’m guessing most use usb dac, spdif hats, or headphone out … hdmi is probably used less often and seems like there’s room for improvement
Which is ironic, since I was doing initial testing on hdmi thinking the built in digital audio option would “obviously” be the simple starting point before trying to add in other options. Anyways - it seems pulseaudio is a good solution for Pi5 HDMI, but I need to play around more. Also looking into other options, but multichannel options are quite limited.
I’ve seen ZERO evidence that ANYTHING plexamp works at all on a Pi. And I’ve seen zero evidence of helpful support. I’ve put a lot of money and hours into this, and it seems plexamp was designed to be as dismissive as it possibly can be to end user configuration, and do it’s own thing, and then abandoned. If it hasn’t been abandoned, then how come there is zero support?
