michaelb,
One point that needs to be emphasized: just try it. Buy a spare sd card (or two, which are around $5 these days for a 32 gig card) and try several different streamers. If you don’t like picore over rune or Volumio, etc. pop your original sd card back in the pi, reboot and your good to go with the app you like best.
For some time, I put off experimenting with Raspberry Pi’s thinking it would be more work than fun. I have found just the opposite: with so much great documentation on the web and many, many YouTube videos available, it you hit a speed bump, it won’t send you careening off a cliff.
As a total aside, I remember how tough it was, as a kid in the mid-Seventies to try and get some time on a computer - mainframes in those days- to learn how to program. Now thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and other manufacturers like Arduino, a kid can literally buy a fully functioning, single board computer with a second hand monitor and keyboard for well less than $100. It’s simply amazing to me. And the documentation to get started with this is written at a level that, literally, is aimed at a 10 year old audience.
Unlike some simple Basic programs we were writing back in the day, today’s budding hacker can attach their Pi to a bread board, microcontroller, camera, or a $25 DAC, etc. and do things we couldn’t have even imagined when we were in 9th grade.
Anytime i see a kid wasting time playing video games, I think of how much they could learn spending that same time in front of a Pi, building a streamer or interfacing to an Arduino (or the just released $4 Pi Pico board.)
And frankly, that’s why the Pi Foundation came about.
Per Wikipedia:
The lack of programmable hardware for children – the sort of hardware we used to have in the 1980s – is undermining the supply of eighteen-year-olds who know how to program, so that's a problem for universities, and then it's undermining the supply of 21 year olds who know how to program, and that's causing problems for industry.
Co-founder Eben Upton in 2012[10]
And to bring this back to the topic at hand, I think of the absolutely incredible audio system a teenager can build around a Pi based Volumio streamer, a $75 Class D amp, a pair of nice $200 to $300 speakers and a cellphone, literally literally result in system with better fidelity than anything money could buy in 1975 (compared to a poppy turntable or hissy cassette deck like we listened to.)
As far as technology goes, it‘s a great time to be a fifteen year old kid. Or a sixty year old kid at heart.
