Suggestions for the future: Headless RPi support!

Plex Labs
41

Better get Barkley on guard duty, @elan! That kind of heresy’ll get the Golden Eared Ones after you. Or maybe not, they’re probably too busy buying hard-drives to store their 24-bit/192kHz vinyl rips.

Last time I tried it I couldn’t tell the difference between decent MP3s and lossless either, and I was probably around 18 so my ears will have deteriorated significantly since then. But then you spend too much money on nice headphones, DACs and amplifiers and find yourself spending too much time faffing about over sampling rates and bit perfection …

42

@elan Any update on PlexAmp for the Pi?

My Old Man is chasing me now. I set him up with Plex Server over Christmas on a Pi, which to my surprise he was very keen to remove control via Plex on a tablet. Sadly the Web Plex Client on the server whilst still running disappears from the list of clients you can remote control after a while so he has to make do with the web client being displayed on the TV and a crappy remote keyboard.

1 Like
43

@tomsimmons ~ I’ll hit you up this week, and just get you going by hand for now, you’ve been super patient.

44

@elan My roon sub is up for renewal in a few days, if you’ve got a beta your willing to share of PlexAmp for the pi I would greatly appreciate

45

@elan said:
@tomsimmons ~ I’ll hit you up this week, and just get you going by hand for now, you’ve been super patient.

Thanks @elan

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@elan i’m interested in a beta of plexamp on raspberry pi.

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I would like the Plexamp on RPi too. Currently running moOde and Roon trial.

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@elan I would also love to try a beta of the headless pi version of plexamp.

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I just got @tomsimmons up and running, so I should be able to post some instructions this week. It ain’t pretty or turnkey, but it sounds hella good once you get it set up :lol:

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@elan - great! Really looking forward to this, not afraid of getting my hands dirty :slight_smile:

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Found this thread. while looking for exactly the same thing. Created an account just to voice one more person in support of this!

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Glad to have you, @bwojtyna!

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@elan Can you share the raw notes from when you got @tomsimmons going? I have some tinker time due to long weekend plus RPi and Odroid-C2 ready to go.

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Long time Plex Pass user. I have a Linux server running my Plex (and unfortunately Roon) server.

I started out a few years ago using RasPlex to distribute music using RasPi’s and various audio HAT boards. Endpoints.

Moved to Roon as they have better hardware (audio HAT’s) than RasPlex.

What does this solution do that’s different / better?

Would like to ditch Roon and simplify with only Plex.

55

@jacrider said:
Moved to Roon as they have better hardware (audio HAT’s) than RasPlex.

What does this solution do that’s different / better?

Would like to ditch Roon and simplify with only Plex.

It uses MPD under the hood as a player, which provides all sorts of nice things (gapless, loudness leveling, crossfading, etc.)

Looking forward to you simplifying :wink:

56

This is super rough, but it’s a start. I use this hat for digital audio, it’s cheap and high quality.

  1. Download https://files.plexapp.com/elan/plexamp-v1.0.5-pi.tar.gz
  2. Get a server.json file from existing Plexamp install, install in /home/pi/.config/Plexamp/. Sign out and back into your existing install to get a new identifier/token.
  3. Install node.js on the Pi.
$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_9.x | sudo -E bash -
$ sudo apt install -y nodejs
  1. Unpack plexamp-v1.0.5-pi.tar.gz in /home/pi
  2. Copy over plexamp.service to /lib/systemd/system/
  3. Get service running
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable plexamp
$ sudo systemctl start plexamp
$ sudo systemctl status plexamp
  1. Profit!

BONUS ROUND: If you get this USB relay module Plexamp will turn it off/on as needed. I use it to control my receiver.

7 Likes
57

@elan Thanks for the instructions!!!
I’m having troubles running the node server on my distro (armv6 pi ZeroW running Raspbian v8 (jessie)). The output:

$ sudo /usr/local/bin/node /home/volumio/plexamp/server/server.prod.js
/home/volumio/plexamp/server/node_modules/bindings/bindings.js:83
        throw e
        ^

Error: /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.21' not found (required by /home/volumio/plexamp/server/node_modules/serialport/build/Release/serialport.node)

$ node -v
v6.11.0

I tried updating different dependencies with no luck (gcc-4.9 g+±4.9 libstdc++6 build-essential). Stack overflow suggest that the project needs to be rebuilt with a statically linked libstdc++. Any thoughts, suggestions?

58

@elan - Result! Thank you so much! I got the basic player working through headphone port. Now fighting with USB DAC.

@christopherru - I am running “Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)” - worked more or less out of the box. Did install as user pi and used the systemd integration. Needed another sudo systemctl start plexamp. If you have another sdcard maybe you can give it a go with Raspbian Stretch. My hardware is Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

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Working here too. The volume through the analog output seems low, but maybe not. Not everyone in house is up yet so I can’t crank it up quite yet. Debating on getting a better DAC, but its sounding pretty good to me.

Thanks!!

edit: figured out the volume issue. running alsamixer from the command line showed me my system volume was at 40%. at 100% now and everything is great.

60

OK - USB DAC was easy enough, I added device "hw:1,0" in /home/pi/plexamp/resources/helpers/linux-arm/mpd.conf in the audio_output section to read:

audio_output {
  type "alsa"
  device "hw:1,0"
  name "my audio device"
  mixer_type "software"
}

The 1 in hw:1,0 is the ALSA index of the sound card. List index of ALSA sound cards with:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /proc/asound/cards 
 0 [ALSA           ]: bcm2835_alsa - bcm2835 ALSA
                      bcm2835 ALSA
 1 [DAC            ]: USB-Audio - OPPO HA-2 USB AUDIO 2.0 DAC
                      OPPO OPPO HA-2 USB AUDIO 2.0 DAC at usb-3f980000.usb-1.4, high speed

Need to look into an more elegant way to solve this, otherwise I will have to redo the change every time a plexamp update gets installed.

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