Need guidance on emulating hibylink with raspberry Pi headless music player.

[manueljenkin]

In short words, I want to emulate hibylink on a raspberry Pi 3 transport + 256gb pendrive containing music + topping nx4 dac-amp system.

Choosing raspberry Pi 3, since it has Bluetooth integrated.

The setup would be like this. A compact 256gb usb drive with music connected to one of the raspberry Pi ports and the topping nx4 connected to another usb port in dac mode. The raspberry Pi will be run on battery in an enclosure, and the topping nx4 will be stacked on top of that for a portable unit. (The nx4 has its internal battery so it won't consume much out of the pi).

I'd want the system to support replay gain since my music collection has tracks that have replay gain measurements from -19db to +18db.. which means without any proper normalization, if I ponder into two wrong music sets on the extreme ends I'd have 37db extra loudness shoved in.

The playback of music from this unit shall be controlled via Bluetooth from an Android phone/windows pc and I want to implement it similar to hibylink.

Hibylink, for people who don't know is a feature in devices with hiby os like cayin N3, Shanling M2 etc. What it does is it first scans the SD card in the dap and creates a list of the files with all the metadata (excluding the album art due to space constraints). And then once we connect the dap to phone over Bluetooth and use hiby music app the dap sends over this information to the phone and from there, using your phone you can access all the music you have in the dap.

I'd like to do a similar implementation (so will have to design an app or need to know if there is any app available already)... In my case, instead of sending the list over Bluetooth, I'd rather copy that file that has that list and transfer it manually to my phone since my music collection changes rarely. This way I won't have Bluetooth size limitations and can also transfer the album art. Currently in hibylink album art alone is not transferred in that file but rather shared for that specific music file alone when playing back the music, and there's a small lag in retrieving the album art.

All my music is stored in the pendrive, and just in case I want to get input from a pc/phone (say when watching YouTube video), I'd rather plug out the topping nx4 from the raspberry Pi and directly connect to my pc/phone. I don't need the raspberry Pi device to behave as a streamer taking in inputs from computer or a network or wireless.

Any guidance on how I could get started?

Thanks and Regards,
Manuel Jenkin.

 

[somebodyelse]

I don't know of anything that'll give you control over bluetooth, but PiCorePlayer will get you most of the way there via WiFi if you follow the complete music player option. Last time I checked the 'be a WiFi access point' options were present in the Beta part of the GUI but not working. That was a few months ago though, so it may be working now. You can then connect the phone to that access point, and use one of the apps like Squeezer or iPeng to control it.

 

[somebodyelse]

moOde claims to have wifi access point mode working. I think can be controlled from any of the MPD remote apps.