Audio, photography, books and miscellany

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fearful porpentine  -Hamlet, William Shakespeare That tale has nothing on getting Arch + MPD + DSD playback working. Rather than bore you with the details and frustration of the many false starts and shimmying up wrong trees, let me quickly give you the config that works for me. You can get a little more context from reading parts 1 and 2 of HTPC experiments. Since the stock mpd in the pacman Arch repos wasn't honoring DSD related settings in the configuration file, I had to compile mpd from source and patch it with a DSD patch. As of this writing, I don't know if the patch has been merged. If you use pacman to get mpd (v 0.19), DSD playback does not work. The iFI micro IDSD card only gets PCM streams at either 41k or 48...

With the base OS installed, it was time to get other bits and pieces installed. Kodi was fairly easy to install and I set it up as a standalone service  Install Kodi as a standalone-service The most frustrating part was up next.... Getting my TV Remote to work with the LIRC so that I could control Kodi from the remote. Definitely beats twiddling around with the Kore app. Don't get me wrong, the app is great. It's just that from a usability and familiarity perspective, the TV remote is a lot easier. I wasn't anticipating any headaches because in an earlier attempt, I had openelec/kodi working on a raspberry Pi hooked to the same setup and TV just working fine out of the box. The RPi has a HDMI CEC adapter built in and the openelec/Kodi setup was using that to hook up the remote. The NUC doesn't have a CEC adapter built in but comes with a Nuvoton IR controller, so I figured I would use that with LIRC to control Kodi. What followed next was a bit of a nightmare giv...

Had some time on my hands, so I thought I will put together a DIY HTPC running Linux. A couple of things that I wanted to accomplish with this setup. Use some media-center software (Kodi/XBMC) for playing videos Use a more 'audiophile' DAC for playing bit-perfect DSD music files Have a general purpose Linux box for twiddling around At some stage, use this for post processing my photography (darktable et al)  So first off, I looked around to see if I could make do with stuff I already had at home. Went rooting around and stumbled on the manual for my Emotiva XMC-1. It has an onboard DAC which can be hooked up to a computer but sadly (as of this writing, circa Aug 2016), it can't play DSDs natively.  From the XMC-1 Manual  USB Stream Input: Use this input to connect a computer or other compatible media client to the XMC-1. The XMC-1 will appear as a USB audio device (sound card or speaker) to a computer that is connected to this input. This input suppo...