Had my Pi for a while now and I've been running it headless in the music room connected to a Cambridge Audio DAC for playing music from an cifs mountpoint which points back at my Plex music library (obviously just file system based - no comms with PMS) on my Mac. Mpd takes care of the streaming and MPad takes care of controlling it all - its a great setup for pure music.
Got the rasPlex client on a card and running this morning - amazing work you guys have been doing to get the Plex client up and running on the Pi :) This is going to be great for getting the full Plex experience in other rooms in the house.
Obviously my audio setup is a little different to most peoples - I can change some ALSA config in mpd and make it see the hw1,0 (the DAC) as the soundcard - if I turn of HW mixing it will send raw 96000Khz sound straight to the DAC (however the broadcom usb drivers in the Pi are not so good with anything over 48000Khz right now)
In the preferences screen in rasPlex you only get audio output choices of Analog (yuk) or HDMI. HDMI is fine providing you are going out to a HT amplifier - not so useful to me as I need all sound to go to ALSA device hw1,0 - into the DAC - and out via RCA to a regular integrated stereo amp.
Do you guys have any plans to enumerate external USB soundcards and allow users to select them via the UI ?
In the meantime is there a config file for the client that I can modify to make it see the DAC (USB soundcard) ?
These are cool ideas and a nice setup, but I don't think the OpenELEC-based RasPlex is the way to go.
The current RasPlex releases are more focused to be a lightweight TV-Client - highly integrated and not built for much customization.
There are some people already working on a Raspbian-package for PlexHT. This solution allows much more customization and should be more suitable for your advanced use case.
We will add this to our wishlist but you should create an OpenELEC (maybe XBMC too?) feature request to support external audio interfaces too. Maybe this will be part of RasPlex in the future this way...
Right now it will be going to ALSA hw0,0 for Analog and maybe hw0,1 for HDMI - it just needs mapping to ALSA hw1,0 for external cards.
You can do some stuff in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf to force external cards up the alsa chain so they become hw0,0 if they are present (demoting the built-in card to hw1) - this would be a quick way of doing it I think but it wouldn't map in the PlexHT UI very well.
As I'm not familiar with how you've done things you may even be using PulseAudio for sound ?
I've contributed the Flickr and Picasa plugins to Plex in the past (which reminds me I must speak to Elan about plexpass). If my day job didn't get in the way of things I'd gladly contribute more.
As I'm not familiar with how you've done things you may even be using PulseAudio for sound ?
I've contributed the Flickr and Picasa plugins to Plex in the past (which reminds me I must speak to Elan about plexpass). If my day job didn't get in the way of things I'd gladly contribute more.
I haven't looked into audio on OpenELEC at all. But feel free to investigate this in more detail and contribute a solution. It would be great to get even more contributors ...
I have a USB sound card I could try, and making the change to pht code shouldn't actually be too bad... it's just a matter of priorities i'm afraid.
We'll probably have this eventually.
That's awesome news.
That's the one thing I really *need* from the RaspberryPI - optical or digital audio output. Unfortunately my receiver is old and has no HDMI so an external sound card seems to be my only option.
