Is Volumio the best 'streamer freeware'?

[driblo]

I did. As far as I can tell, headless is one of the things that slows a pi down when running Buster (the OS of the time). It seemed to expect a hard wire monitor as the primary, and headless as a secondary monitor, because it wanted you to set a screen size, instead of scaling to what you were using. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. Maybe I just never mastered it, because once I had piCorePlayer, I never looked back.
I run JRiver on a MacMini, with a windows PC as file server (not media server). You have to mount the network drive, then, on the Mac, but once you do, it’s smooth sailing. That’s why I got the pi5, so I can use it instead of the Windows PC as the file server, which is on all the time.

jRiver needs xserver session and it is not headless.
I tried it with X11VNC as described in this thread, and it was way too much overhead for de facto server.

Unlike most linux applications, JRiver requires a running xserver in order to work, which means it needs a desktop environment or window manager to be running. By far the easiest way to do that is to have a user account that auto-logs in to a desktop environment or window manager via a display manager, which is what I recommend. That way JRiver starts on every boot with no interaction.

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=123771.0

 

[Dennis_FL]

I did. As far as I can tell, headless is one of the things that slows a pi down when running Buster (the OS of the time). It seemed to expect a hard wire monitor as the primary, and headless as a secondary monitor, because it wanted you to set a screen size, instead of scaling to what you were using. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. Maybe I just never mastered it, because once I had piCorePlayer, I never looked back.
I run JRiver on a MacMini, with a windows PC as file server (not media server). You have to mount the network drive, then, on the Mac, but once you do, it’s smooth sailing. That’s why I got the pi5, so I can use it instead of the Windows PC as the file server, which is on all the time.

I still have roon (also running it on a Mac Mini with a NAS Synology music database) but I'm thinking of ditching it and going back to JRiver. I have one Pi4 as a Roon end point and one Pi4 as a Home Assistant --- The Pi5 is for just for testing now.

 

[Tom C]

jRiver needs xserver session and it is not headless.
I tried it with X11VNC as described in this thread, and it was way too much overhead for de facto server.

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=123771.0

That was my experience too. PiCorePlayer does this much better, but is much more limited in its functionality.