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An Android device as a touchscreen network streamer...

somebodyelse

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I am an user of the SBCs from Odroid so was not aware of this piCorePlayer for Raspberry Pi, thank you so much for the input.
I'm glad to be of service. Archimago's tutorial for setting up a Pi 3 with hifiberry dac and touchscreen interface might be of interest. If you're after DRC then Daphile on an old thin client is a better bet - it's got a gui for enabling BruteFIR and uploading the convolution files. It's a feature I'd love to see in piCorePlayer.
 

digititus

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I'm using Rygel as a simple DNLA music server on a Fedora desktop and connect with good old VLC on Android clients. Minimalistic but fast.
 

Berwhale

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I'm glad to be of service. Archimago's tutorial for setting up a Pi 3 with hifiberry dac and touchscreen interface might be of interest. If you're after DRC then Daphile on an old thin client is a better bet - it's got a gui for enabling BruteFIR and uploading the convolution files. It's a feature I'd love to see in piCorePlayer.

I've put Daphile on a couple of mini PCs I had lying around (Acer Revo M160 and Revo RL70) and i've been impressed. Are you saying Daphile could be installed on a thin client such as a Wyse terminal?
 

somebodyelse

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I've put Daphile on a couple of mini PCs I had lying around (Acer Revo M160 and Revo RL70) and i've been impressed. Are you saying Daphile could be installed on a thin client such as a Wyse terminal?
On many (most?) of them, yes. Do a bit of research before you buy, but most are essentially a PC with a flash drive to store the OS image, and will boot from a usb stick or usb cd drive to install an OS. Minimum requirements for Daphile are said to be a 486 with 512MB RAM and 2GB storage, but i suspect it needs 586 (and NOT a Via C3) if you want to run LMS on it. I've run tests on a 2003 vintage single core centrino laptop throttled to minimum cpu speed with BruteFIR running at 24/96 streaming 24/384 flac files from my usual LMS instance without problems, so it really doesn't need much from the hardware. I've seen suitable fanless thin clients on ebay for less than a Pi regularly.
 
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BillG

BillG

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Re: resampling in BubbleUPnP

It's much ado about nothing. See the below from Bubble's help information... :cool:

IMG_20191010_145657.png
 

GioF71

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The PecanPi with Volumio can be used in much the same way as a renderer for BubbleUPnP.
www.orchardaudio.com/pecanpi

I think the OP's purpose is to suggest a way to repurpose some (possibly) old android devices as network streamers.
That is awesome IMO. Repurpose stuff instead of buying something new is something that contributes to save our planet.

The 'problem', or, better, the thing one might want to consider, is that generally Android resamples audio. The posted screens from BubbleUpnp explicitly tell us so.
Having said that, I think there might still be many scenarios where resampling is not a great concern. After all, the DAC in Android devices is not generally too good compared to a desktop dac, so resampling is probably not the worst problem. For example, for a setup dedicated to provide some background music, who would even notice if resampling is happening?

The problem might occur when you consider connecting a USB DAC to such device.
Unless a specific (generally paid) app is installed to that device, there might be disappointment when you notice that hires audio is resampled to 48kHz or 44.1kHz and truncated to 16bit. So, in this case, if you are not comfortable with this situation, I have suggested that one can still repurpose that device as a pure display for a headless (meaning also display-less) network streamer, like, for example, a raspberry pi with RoPieee XL installed.

EDIT: typos
 
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Severian

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My experience using USB DACs with Android is that the resampling is very, very audible. The difference when using USB Audio Player Pro is striking. I would be curious to see how BubbleUPnP compares.

One of the reasons I love my ES100 is that LDAC bypasses the Android audio subsystem and so I can get no-fuss high quality sound from any app.
 
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BillG

BillG

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I would be curious to see how BubbleUPnP compares.

Poweramp, another popular Android music player with high res support capable of bypassing the stack and interfacing directly with the hardware, also uses the SoX resampler within the FFmpeg decoder. Users consistently rate its sound quality as excellent.

By the way, the concerns about the stack are overblown when feeding it content at the native rate as no resampling would occur then.

Have you performed any double blind, level matched listening tests with which to base your assertments on? A spectral analysis of the exact same content with and without Android resampling at least? Because if one hasn't done that, well... it's just an opinion... :rolleyes:

I'm curious about the open source software USB Audio Player uses also. I'd venture a guess that FFmpeg is part of it.
 
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bubbleguuum

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Hi,

BubbleUPnP developer here. I stumbled on this thread so here's a few clarifications.

The 'resampling to native samplerate' feature is intended for playing to the headphone jack. Most Android devices without advanced audio DAC will resample internally all audio output to the headphone jack to a 'native samplerate' that is most of the time 48kHz. So BubbleUPnP can do this resampling, using a higher quality resampler (SoX).
This is not intended for use with USB DAC or Android devices with advanced DAC (Such as LG devices with the Quad Dac). In that case, it is best to leave that resampling option off as the DAC is probably able to handle high res audio on its own without resampling (unlike stock Android output to headphone jack on most devices). And it's true that USB Audio Player offers more control over this since it is its primary function.
However, using BubbleUPnP with an USB DAC (or Android device with advanced internal DAC), the better settings are to not resample to native samplerate and to enable FFMpeg decoding for all audio formats (local renderer > FFmpeg audio decoding > All audio formats) to feed a WAV stream to the DAC at the samplerate/bitdepth of the original audio (Assuming the Android audio subsystem doing the routing to the DAC is smart enough to pass the PCM unmodified to the USB DAC).
If you have other questions, let me know.
 

Berwhale

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Poweramp, another popular Android music player with high res support capable of bypassing the stack and interfacing directly with the hardware, also uses the SoX resampler within the FFmpeg decoder. Users consistently rate its sound quality as excellent.

By the way, the concerns about the stack are overblown when feeding it content at the native rate as no resampling would occur then.

Have you performed any double blind, level matched listening tests with which to base your assertments on? A spectral analysis of the exact same content with and without Android resampling at least? Because if one hasn't done that, well... it's just an opinion... :rolleyes:

I'm curious about the open source software USB Audio Player uses also. I'd venture a guess that FFmpeg is part of it.

I bought PowerAmp many years ago when I had an HTC Desire running Android Cupcake or Doughnut. I had forgotten that I had it, giving it another go now, I'm liking the copious widget options already.
 

Severian

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Poweramp, another popular Android music player with high res support capable of bypassing the stack and interfacing directly with the hardware, also uses the SoX resampler within the FFmpeg decoder. Users consistently rate its sound quality as excellent.

By the way, the concerns about the stack are overblown when feeding it content at the native rate as no resampling would occur then.

Have you performed any double blind, level matched listening tests with which to base your assertments on? A spectral analysis of the exact same content with and without Android resampling at least? Because if one hasn't done that, well... it's just an opinion... :rolleyes:

I'm curious about the open source software USB Audio Player uses also. I'd venture a guess that FFmpeg is part of it.

My highly unscientific testing, trying to match levels by ear, is with the Tidal app through the normal Android audio stack vs. Tidal streamed through USB Audio Player Pro. But it was impossible to quickly A/B them manually. Even so, the difference seemed plain as day, in fact moreso than I would expect from "just" poor resampling.

I think one would need to record the output and compare on a PC. I'm not sure I'm equipped to properly do such testing but I would be very curious to see the results. As I mentioned before, I sidestep this issue using the ES100 and LDAC (and do not listen to anything beyond 16/44.1), but it would be great to have more clarity on the pitfalls (or lack thereof) of audio on Android.
 

GioF71

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Hi,

BubbleUPnP developer here. I stumbled on this thread so here's a few clarifications.

The 'resampling to native samplerate' feature is intended for playing to the headphone jack. Most Android devices without advanced audio DAC will resample internally all audio output to the headphone jack to a 'native samplerate' that is most of the time 48kHz. So BubbleUPnP can do this resampling, using a higher quality resampler (SoX).
This is not intended for use with USB DAC or Android devices with advanced DAC (Such as LG devices with the Quad Dac). In that case, it is best to leave that resampling option off as the DAC is probably able to handle high res audio on its own without resampling (unlike stock Android output to headphone jack on most devices). And it's true that USB Audio Player offers more control over this since it is its primary function.
However, using BubbleUPnP with an USB DAC (or Android device with advanced internal DAC), the better settings are to not resample to native samplerate and to enable FFMpeg decoding for all audio formats (local renderer > FFmpeg audio decoding > All audio formats) to feed a WAV stream to the DAC at the samplerate/bitdepth of the original audio (Assuming the Android audio subsystem doing the routing to the DAC is smart enough to pass the PCM unmodified to the USB DAC).
If you have other questions, let me know.

Hello, thanks for posting here your clarification.
I have tried this settings already in the past, but I tried again a few minutes ago just to be sure. Of course I am using the registered version of BubbleUpnp and I also own the BubbleDS Next app.
With the settings you suggested (and I would say they are the same I tried before) my DAC displays 192kHz for a natively 44.1kHz stream. I cannot know anything about the bit depth.
I don't doubt your words, but maybe the functionality is not the same with all the phones/android versions?
The particular phone I tried is a 2017 LeMax2 (an Android 6 device) and the dac is actually a DDC, using a XMOS USB receiver chip.
I remember pretty much the same was happening with a Asus Zenfone 2 and with a Fiio X5 as a DAC.
Can you recommend a few devices which work properly with your suggested configuration?

Thanks a lot
 
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BillG

BillG

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Severian

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I realize that. I was trying to be up-front about the limitation of my anecdotal experience and expressing interest in a more rigorous inquiry that I don't think I'm the right person to carry out.
 

ahofer

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I’m being lazy now, and not reading the whole thread, but can an Ethernet connection be brought into the picture, to eliminate Wi-Fi gremlins?
 

ahofer

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I do not see any evidence that the new Nest Mini has digital out. Or that it doesn’t, but you’d think it would get a mention.
 
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