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WiiM Mini Review (Streamer)

Rate this streamer:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 12 2.6%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 47 10.0%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 224 47.8%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 186 39.7%

  • Total voters
    469

Jim Shaw

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Not familiar with your music sources, but when streaming Tidal or Apple Music, the Wiim app has a sleep timer accessed through the current song playing interface. I just tap the 3 dots under the currently playing song’s
artwork. See pic for screenshot while I listened to Apple Music.
You are a genius. I found it. Three little dots... sleep timer... my life is now complete (almost).
<air hug>
 

Witterings

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>I take exception to Amir's refusal to recommend the WiiM just because it doesn't run Roon. Roon is an option, a tax, not a necessity.

I agree with this .... there are maybe 3 ... or possibly 4 people in the world that use .... can't even remember what its’ name is :D:D

Whether it supports Roon or not for such a low user base is totally irrelevant, if Roon thinks this is something relevant to their users let them do the work and develop it and not detract from the WiiM developers fixing bugs that millions of users would benefit from.

At the end of the day Roon's just a media player / organising app with very few subscribers that most streaming services provide a variant of for free.

Honestly don’t get what the love for it is unless you’re high on the spectrum or something.
 

Music1969

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Honestly don’t get what the love for it is unless you’re high on the spectrum or something.
This is a bit insulting to people that are high on the spectrum?

If I had a huge hard drive collection and was happy with Tidal and Qobuz, then Roon is easily the best user experience for that kind of person.

It's a gorgeous UI and very quick and slick if you have the right hardware to run it. If you are trying to run Roon server (not endpoint) on a RPi3 and complaining it is slow, then you're doing it wrong.

If it doesn't suit you that's fine but is it hard to actually see there are people with different needs to you?

I don't get such attitudes in this hobby.

I have a lifetime license since Roon started but don't use it anymore... That doesn't stop me from understanding there are a large group of people that do love Roon for how they listen to music.

And there are above 250k Roon subscribers by the way.
 

BDWoody

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Honestly don’t get what the love for it is unless you’re high on the spectrum or something.

Yeah, that must be it. We are all autistic.

Lovely post.
 

fquails

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Sheesh. The oldest and most used of my three Wiims just died. Bought it April 10, 2022, use it about 4 hours per day in my office to stream mostly Tidal and Apple Music. It will turn on, but won’t connect to wifi, and the Wiim app can’t detect it. It won’t even do its “chiming” sound when starting up. Three months, and dead. Siigh.
 

Ralph_Cramden

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Sheesh. The oldest and most used of my three Wiims just died. Bought it April 10, 2022, use it about 4 hours per day in my office to stream mostly Tidal and Apple Music. It will turn on, but won’t connect to wifi, and the Wiim app can’t detect it. It won’t even do its “chiming” sound when starting up. Three months, and dead. Siigh.

Also swap out the power supply and cable, to make sure those are good.
 

fquails

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Also swap out the power supply and cable, to make sure those are good.
Well, I didn’t try any of the above, other than power cycle it 3 times. It is back to life, for now. But I have been doing that for the past couple of days. I will try the above next time it acts up.
 

photodesignch

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Late for the party for this thread. Special thanks to @Ralph_Cramden your little project inspired me. I did the exact same project and idea built up an upnp app exact like what you've done. only I didn't go far to make it chrome extension and I built my backend with node.js and vuetify as front-end.
 

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Ralph_Cramden

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Late for the party for this thread. Special thanks to @Ralph_Cramden your little project inspired me. I did the exact same project and idea built up an upnp app exact like what you've done. only I didn't go far to make it chrome extension and I built my backend with node.js and vuetify as front-end.
Gorgeous! Puts my little hack to shame, lol. I do hope you'll share it on github!

Vuetify looks nice; I used to do AngularJS back in the day at Megacorp, but this looks like it takes Material Design to another level.
 
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photodesignch

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Gorgeous! Puts my little hack to shame, lol. I do hope you'll share it on github!

Vuetify looks nice; I used to do AngularJS back in the day at Megacorp, but this looks like it takes Material Design to another level.
Thanks! I'll push up to github when i am done. still ironing out some little bugs that nags me. Actually Vuetify is mostly just material UI evolution. I am simply using the tools that's been provided. This is actually the first time I use Vue. So this pet project is my "hello world".

The only difference from yours is I sent out the probe to gather available media renderers first, so I can switch between renderers from UI and control them from there like muti-room. but idea is no different than yours. It's just a controller. It doesn't render as a player, and it can't be a media server either. so what can be done here is very minimal. Unless I get into implementing the api key of music services and pull down streaming data for passthrough.. At that point, I am pretty much writing the whole roon, volumio, lms myself.. (makes no sense!)
 

Smartplug

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I wonder what happen we’re not getting update and on either firmware or app.
 

Music1969

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I wonder what happen we’re not getting update and on either firmware or app.
Working on fixing issues? Working on new features?

Maybe a key person has gone on a holiday break (much deserved?)

Normal things :)
 

Music1969

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Late for the party for this thread. Special thanks to @Ralph_Cramden your little project inspired me. I did the exact same project and idea built up an upnp app exact like what you've done. only I didn't go far to make it chrome extension and I built my backend with node.js and vuetify as front-end.
Beautiful !

Have you got it running on Debian Bullseye ?

I saw Ralph tried Bullseye but ultimately went with Buster (Raspberry Pi OS-Lite Buster)
 
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photodesignch

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as promised https://github.com/chrishuangcf/wiim-mini-ui

I haven't tried to run on the Raspberry Pi. but in reality it's just a node.js application with the web app static page. I'll give it a try to run on my raspberry pi and give you guys an update. I did try to run at my amazon echo show 5. the UI seems to be fine but it has to be the "browser mode" not "kiosk mode" from the silk browser due to silk browser kiosk mode the font size were defaulted to be way too large.
 

jhaider

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At the end of the day Roon's just a media player / organising app with very few subscribers that most streaming services provide a variant of for free.

Honestly don’t get what the love for it is unless you’re high on the spectrum or something.
More likely, they don’t have Macs/iDevices so they need a third party solution to provide the integration between local library and streaming that comes standard in Apple-land. (I’m ignoring the spec differences between direct connect whatever and normal AirPlay, because they are of zero audible consequence.)
 

Jim Shaw

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I just received m second WiiM today. It started up without a hitch.

Why a second one? I first placed one WiiM in the bedroom system, replacing an Echo Input. I'm using Amazon Music Prime UltraHD or whatever they call it today. The WiiM is primarily for going to sleep and as a clock radio.

The new WiiM goes into the living room system, which is of substantially better musical capability. I have long been using an iPad to stream Amazon Music, etc. The iPad feeds USB to a Schiit Modi 3. This works and sounds very good, but the iPad is anchored to the system; no remote control. The new WiiM feeds optical to the same Modi, and my phone controls it nicely. It works well, but the music seems to be of slightly lower quality than the iPad (same Amazon source). I suspect a lower sample rate is getting to the Modi 3 via optical. There's a bit of raspiness in string sections and choral voices. My imagination? Does anybody know why?

On the very bright side is the ability to sync and play both systems together. The bedroom is in a loft open to the living room, so it's imperative they play exactly together -- and they do. I didn't realize how well they could do this before trying it.

So far, I'm a pretty happy WiiM user. -Just one man's view.
 

Brantome

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I just received m second WiiM today. It started up without a hitch.

Why a second one? I first placed one WiiM in the bedroom system, replacing an Echo Input. I'm using Amazon Music Prime UltraHD or whatever they call it today. The WiiM is primarily for going to sleep and as a clock radio.

The new WiiM goes into the living room system, which is of substantially better musical capability. I have long been using an iPad to stream Amazon Music, etc. The iPad feeds USB to a Schiit Modi 3. This works and sounds very good, but the iPad is anchored to the system; no remote control. The new WiiM feeds optical to the same Modi, and my phone controls it nicely. It works well, but the music seems to be of slightly lower quality than the iPad (same Amazon source). I suspect a lower sample rate is getting to the Modi 3 via optical. There's a bit of raspiness in string sections and choral voices. My imagination? Does anybody know why?

On the very bright side is the ability to sync and play both systems together. The bedroom is in a loft open to the living room, so it's imperative they play exactly together -- and they do. I didn't realize how well they could do this before trying it.

So far, I'm a pretty happy WiiM user. -Just one man's view.
Do you definitely have the new Mini’s output set to 24/192? I’m not sure the iPad route would have been bit perfect tbh - from recollection, it would have played everything at the max resolution it thought the DAC supported. I would have expected the WiiM‘s bit perfect output to be better.

And re Amazon Music, there are just three variants: Amazon Music Free, Amazon Music Prime and Amazon Music Unlimited. The last one is the lossless one with up to 90m HD and UHD tracks, while the first two offer lossy tracks.
 

photodesignch

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Do you definitely have the new Mini’s output set to 24/192? I’m not sure the iPad route would have been bit perfect tbh - from recollection, it would have played everything at the max resolution it thought the DAC supported. I would have expected the WiiM‘s bit perfect output to be better.

And re Amazon Music, there are just three variants: Amazon Music Free, Amazon Music Prime and Amazon Music Unlimited. The last one is the lossless one with up to 90m HD and UHD tracks, while the first two offer lossy tracks.
Be careful about it though.. WiiM Mini app actually has to change optical out resolution 24bit / 192 kHz manually PER renderer. If you found out one is not bit perfect, maybe that's why?

There are so many compatibility issues on the hardware and streaming providers. However, WiiM Mini so far exceed my expectations. It's truly the only bit perfect within budget unless you build your own raspberry pi solution. It's even... BETTER than Echo Link or Echo Link Amp IMHO.
 
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