For a long time I have been meaning to get a Raspberry Pi and create a dedicated streaming music player that I can connect to my surround sound system. With lockdown 3.0 I finally bit the bullet and ordered the kit from HiFiBerry.com and got it done.
Step 1 – Building the kit.
This was really straight forward. It took around 30 minutes. It didn’t come with any instructions so took some figuring out but I got it worked out in the end.
Step 2 – Loading the PiCorePlayer software
I was going to use this to connect to the Logitech Media Server. It’s a low key piece of software running on the Pi Core OS and implementing the Squeezelite software all bundled together and running as one.
I used the Raspberry Pi Imager software which made the job of loading the OS onto the SD card super simple. You can download that from the Raspberry Pi site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/
You can read more about the player software at https://www.picoreplayer.org/
3 – Enabling WiFi on the Pi
WiFi isn’t enabled by default so I had to load a file onto the SD card with SSID details for our network. The Pi loads this on boot and voila. I used this guide to configure: https://docs.picoreplayer.org/how-to/setup_wifi_on_pcp_without_ethernet/
4 – Playing some music
I am using the device as a headless unit, ie without being connected to a screen… so was looking for a nice and free way of doing this. You can use iPeng but that’s costly so I did some hunting!
I found the following plugin for Logitech Media Server: https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material
This plugin, called Material, uses HTML5 to give you a nice layout for playing music from a webbrowser.
You can watch me putting it together in the video below: