Tech

So far, I have owned and used iPads (first generation iPad, third generation iPad and a first generation iPad mini for work). I posted previously about my search for a usable stylus for iPad (Smartphones, tablets and styli). This was pretty much unsuccessful: iPad styli were always inadequately precise, either because they had a rubber blob of a tip that mimicked a fingertip, or because the bluetooth system used wasn't precise enough. A couple of years ago, I made my belated entry to the smartphone market, with a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (I recently updated to a Galaxy Note 4). This device comes with the S Pen, an interesting device that gives a really good screen response when writing. Coupled with excellent handwriting conversion, this meant that text entry by scribbling on the screen was a realistic proposition. Here's a good description of how the S Pen works. Essentially, from that site:

An electromagnetic field is generated from a circuit behind the screen. The S Pen picks this up and uses it to power itself and figure out its position relative to the screen. It sends this, along with information from the S Pen button and the nib at the end, back to the Note.

At that point, it was abundantly clear that my next tablet purchase was likely to be a Samsung Note device. And on a recent visit to a department store I had a little play with a Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 tablet - and my partner bought one. After a weekend of seeing this device in action, I bought one too - reduced in price to £324. Anyway, for me (and the work I do) this is an iPad killer - for example:

• Bigger screen, at a very decent resolution
• Android 4.4.2 (this is like climbing over the wall of the Apple prison)
• The S pen, which offers realistic sketch pad and handwriting recognition
• Easier file transfer to and from the device than iTunes allows
• Ability to add to the 32Gb onboard memory - I added a 64Gb card
• Most of the apps I use on the iPad are also available on the Galaxy, and those that aren't have perfectly good alternatives
• You can run up to 4 apps simultaneously onscreen.

This is basically a power user's tablet, and I really can't fault it. But it's the S Pen that really sells it to me. Here's a very detailed review dating from March last year, when the beast retailed at about £649. I think it's a pretty accurate review. I doubt I'd have been keen to cough up £649, but at £324 this seemed a great deal - I presume the discounted price means it's either discontinued or a new model is due shortly.

After Apple replaced my 2 gigabyte first generation iPod Nano with a nifty little 8Gb sixth generation model (due to a product recall), I found myself using that in preference to my Cowon X7, even though the latter has 160Gb storage. The consequence of this is that I allowed the X7 to completely discharge.

No problem, I thought, just charge it up again. But no! Things are not that simple. It transpires that the Cowon firmware doesn’t take kindly to a fully discharged battery, and won’t let it charge. I did a spot of Googling, and discovered a suggested solution - to connect it to the charger for a long period - 100h was mentioned.

Well, I tried that, to no avail.

A second suggestion was to open up the case, and briefly short out two wires that connect the main circuit board to the battery. This then resets the system so it can charge the battery. Opening the device was quite tricky. It’s held together by four tiny T6 torx screws. A visit to the workshop, and the screws were out. The two halves of the case are clicked together, and took a bit of leverage to separate. This done, the innards are exposed - everything remains attached to the front of the case.

This is what's revealed when the back of the unit is removed. Most of the space is occupied by the hard drive and the battery. The PCBs on the left are partly covered by a thin blue film of insulator.

Here’s a close-up showing the connections that need to be shorted. You need to gently peel back the blue film, then use a paperclip or similar to short out the two soldered joints (black and red wires) at bottom right.

After that, the device starts accepting charge again. A couple of hours later, the battery was fully charged and I was ready to go.

This problem seems quite widespread and I saw several instances in discussion forums around the web. It does appear to be a significantly bonkers design flaw. Still, now I know what to do!

I’m always interested in tinkering with alternative audio usage of my Raspberry Pi devices. As standard, I’m using them as Squeezebox substitutes, running the minimalist OS piCorePlayer, though I’ve also tried Squeezeplug and Raspbian for this. Rune Audio, which I think is derived from RaspyFi as a fork at the time RaspyFi became Volumio (though I may have that the wrong way round), recently released a version 0.3 beta for the Raspberry Pi, so (being naturally curious) I decided to try it out.

[caption id="attachment_3345" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Runeaudio's UI is elegant, clear and simple[/caption]

Rune Audio is managed via a web browser. The picture above shows what the main interface looks like. The bar at the bottom allows you to switch from Library to Playback or Queue (pretty self-evident what those are). Image art is centre stage, with the progress wheel on it's left (big number is elapsed time, smaller is track length), while on the right is the software volume control. The play controls are a little counter-intuitive - this is a screengrab while a track is playing, and I would have expected the play symbol to have been replaced with a pause symbol. Finally, the Menu link at top right is where you access most of the setup functions.

Installation is trivial - just download the zipped image file, unzip it and burn the card. After booting the Pi, it’s pretty straightforward - in principle at least - to get the device working. All configuration is done via Rune’s web interface to its Arch Linux-based OS, called Rune UI. You can reach this by pointing a browser at runeaudio.local or at the device’s IP address.

Despite the fact that the majority of settings (such as the USB DAC) are setup by default, I had quite a few issues getting Rune Audio sorted, and at least some of these are down to my ignorance of how Rune UI and its underlying system work. In my own defence, the documentation pages are a little empty at the moment. For example, music playback of files located on local or NAS drives uses MPD (Music Player Daemon), while you seem to need to switch to a separate music renderer to play Spotify streams.

My first issue was persuading RuneAudio to mount my NAS, which is a QNAP device holding about 500Gb music files - a shade under 20,000 tracks, mostly a mix of flac and mp3 files, though with a few alac and wav. These files are all tagged in a way that satisifies Logitech Media Server (LMS), which I have running on the NAS, and feeding several Squeezeboxes and allied devices. In the end, this seemed to work once I’d created a mount folder under /mnt/MPD/NAS - I did this on the command line after logging in via a terminal on my laptop. Essentially, you go to Menu>Sources and choose Network or USB mounts. I found I couldn't make my NAS connect via NFS, and went for SMB/CFS.

Once the NAS was mounted, I needed to have MPD scan the folders of music and generate the database that’s used to navigate the music collection. This scan took ages on WiFi, around 2h for my 20,000 or so tracks. It's quicker via ethernet.

You navigate between the Library, Playback and Queue screens using the buttons at the bottom of the screen. The Library screen shows six options, where you can select to play music from files on a NAS; an attached USB storage device; Spotify (you need a Premium account for this); Jamendo (described as the World’s largest platform  of free music - I haven’t tried this); My Web Radios (I haven’t tried this yet); and Dirble, which is apparently another radios stations thing. Note that under Spotify it says “click to switch renderer” - this turns out to be significant.

If you select the NAS option, you can select the NAS you want to attach to. I presume this can allow several NAS devices to be used. After this, the music collection is organised in hierarchy, as expected, of Artist > Album > Tracks. Oddly, the Artist and Album names seem to follow folder names rather than the tags in the files. I’m not sure whether this is how MPD is supposed to work, but it seems a little clunky compared with LMS. LMS also offers quite a few options for browsing and searching the music collection which Rune UI does not. This may be because Rune is a relatively new project, or perhaps because the developers are keen to keep a straightforward UI.

[caption id="attachment_3346" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Select library on NAS, USB storage, Spotify, etc[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3347" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Artist names seem to be derived from folder names rather than tags...[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3348" align="alignnone" width="1000"] ...as are album titles...[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3349" align="alignnone" width="1000"] ...but the actual song file tags appear to be properly used.[/caption]

Once you reach your artist, album or track, you can add it/them to the playlist by clicking the symbol of three horizontal lines over on the right hand side of the window - several options are offered (including the option to update this folder).

Overall, the Rune UI offers really rather nice and clean interface. The volume control (you need to choose software volume control in the MPD settings screen) can be a little slow to respond. And I do question the player controls at the top of the main windows. This shows buttons with the classic previous; stop; play and pause; and next symbols. Strangely, the play/pause button shows the currently selected function, rather than the option available on the next click.

At this point, I decided to switch to Spotify. I’d already entered my account details in the Settings page. It turns out that when you select Spotify in the Library screen, up comes a pop up thriugh which you can change renderer from MPD to Spotify (there are a couple of other options which I haven’t tried yet). You need to do this to get to Spotify.

Once in Spotify it’s really easy to select your playlists. Hoever, it seems to me that the software volume control doesn’t work when you’re using the Spotify renderer.

[caption id="attachment_3350" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Playlists in Spotify. I'm not sure how Rune handles Spotify playlist folders[/caption]  

I was initially baffled as to how to switch back to the NAS - just going to back to the Library screen doesn’t work - the selection of NAS is just dead. I puzzled over this for a while, before I realised that I needed to click on a small MPD button on the Playback screen - this is just above the album art - before going back to the Library screen. This brings up the same renderer screen as appeared when Spotify was first selected. Choose ‘MPD’, and after a while the setting is changed. Look out for the little popup notification window. If you have a playlist of tracks located on the NAS that you’ve not completed, it will resume. Anyway, once you’ve returned to MPD you can go back to the Library screen and navigate the music on the NAS.

Useful tip: there are some good functions available at runeaudio.local/dev if you get the system stuck. There’s also an option to update the system from github.

Pros and Cons

+ Neat and straightforward once set up; + Doesn't need a separate music server; + Administering the unit via the web interface is nice; + Good unbroken stream via USB DAC; + Really easy to as last.fm and Spotify account details; + Handles Spotify playlists well

- More limited in features than PiCorePlayer/LMS (not surprising, LMS has had more years of development); - Some menu items are a bit awkward; - Doesn't seem to like Spotify Playlist folders; - MPD appears to use folder names (rather than tags) to set up the navigation hierarchy

Next up, I want to try getting Rune to run the Wolfson DAC card, as among other things it's supposed to have a hadware volume control - supposed to be OK out of the box, but I've not had too much luck so far.

Postscript: 24h after getting all the above to work, the RuneAudio player can't mount the NAS folder. So I've reverted back the PiCorePlayer on the LMS system, at least for the time being.

I have recently been playing around with using Raspberry Pi devices as streaming music players within a Squeezebox-based system. I've arrived at quite a comprehensive arrangement, which includes a Pi as a player: This is a rough illustration of my current implementation of a network of Squeezebox players linked to a NAS (GrumpyBox) running Logitech Media Server (LMS). It consists of several Logitech Squeezeboxes, a couple of iPads that are playback-capable through apps such as SqueezePad and iPeng, and the software Squeezebox emulater, SqueezePlay. To this I have recently added a Raspberry Pi running piCorePlayer. I also have a second Raspberry Pi running Squeezeplug, which has its own instance of LMS (not shown in the diagram). I've summarised the usage cases of the three setups I have tried in the table below. My opinion can be summarised as:

• If all you want to do is run a media player connected to an existing LMS, choose the piCorePlayer option.
• If you need to set up a media server as well as a player, choose the Squeezeplug option.
• By far the most versatile of the two DAC cards I've tried is the Wolfson DAC - if you want to use this, then Squeezeplug or the custom Wolfson kernel options are best.
• Both Squeezeplug and piCorePlayer work well with USB DACs

	Squeezeplug	piCorePlayer	Wolfson kernel
URL	website	website	website
Usage	Convenient low cost LMS server and player	Low cost and easy to use player. Configured via web interface.	Wolfson supply a patched image supporting the DAC. Squeezelite can easily be installed and configured
LMS	yes	no	no
Guide	Squeezeplug wiki	I also described this installation here. Instructions at the piCorePlayer website	I described this here
Wolfson DAC	supported	not supported	supported
HiFiBerry	supported	supported
Notes	1, 4	2, 3

1. May require powered USB hub if a USB-powered hard drive is used with LMS
2. piCorePlayer is run solely from RAM. The Pi can be powered off without corrupting the SD card
3. Also supports the Sabre DAC and the HiFiBerryDigi card though I’ve not tried these
4. I set up a script for a button press to shutdown the Squeezeplug (and the Wolfson kernel) systems so the Pi can be safely powered down. See here.

For both the Raspberry Pi based devices I use, you do need to think about how you interact with them. I use the LMS web interface (usually found at http://IPaddress:9000) with a laptop, or one of the many tablet or smartphone apps that are available (such as the afore-mentioned SqueezePad and iPeng). Installing any of these devices is much easier if you have a reasonable amount of experience with the Linux command line. On the other hand, a Raspberry Pi is a pretty good way to learn the Linux command line!