Just wondering about pi performance

[matt]

Hi,
I am currently using a wdtv live (3rd gen) as a music server using the optical out into my denon reciever. While this works ok as far as reproducing music the the UI is painfully slow to the point of being almost unusable, and when set to random play there is a long gap between songs and if I skip a song it takes around 10 secs to stop playing the song and there is another long gap before the next song starts. I have approx 1.5TB of mp3, flac and hi res flac files. I assume its the sheer size of the library which makes everything so slow coupled with an underpowered device.
I want to avoid these issues with my proposed build.
The wdtv live has a Sigma Designs SMP8670AD-CBE3 processor with 512MB of DDR2 memory from four Nanya NT5TU128M8GE-AC chips spread around the motherboard.
How does this compare in terms of performance with a pi?
Does the pi have enough processing power to avoid these issues?
Thanks

[cmh714]

you can dig up the stats on the Pi, but what I will say is I have >1TB of FLAC and HD FLAC and dont have any issues like you are having. YMMV

[matt]

you can dig up the stats on the Pi, but what I will say is I have >1TB of FLAC and HD FLAC and dont have any issues like you are having. YMMV

Thanks. Thats the sort of comment i was hoping for.

[skrodahl]

RuneAudio, especially with the latest 0.3-alpha build, is very responsive.

I have no experience with your Western Digital unit, but I promise you that you will enjoy RuneAudio immensely. It's built with audio quality in mind, and it's super easy to use. You can even control it from your Android device, or iPhone/iPad, using MPDroid and MPad respectively.

The web-ui is snappy, and it doesn't slow down depending on the uptime of the Raspberry Pi. Adding songs/albums to the playlist and removing them again, skipping within songs, pausing, playing, changing volume, setting repeat etc. are all instantaneous operations with absolutely no delay at all.

What you need to know is that by being built on MPD for organizing and playing music, RuneAudio will perform somewhat slower for certain operations that are not related to music playback.

The first time you start up RuneAudio you need to build the music library. That will take a good 20-30 minutes with a library that exceeds 1TB. As MPD builds the library, all discovered music is accessible and can be played with no performance hit at all.

Everytime you add music to your RuneAudio storage, you will need to scan the library again. This operation takes a couple of minutes, and does not affect overall functionality or performance.

I also find that with a large library (I haven't tried with a small library to be honest), the search is not exactly instantaneous. Any search will take four or five seconds.

Any MPD configuration changes, you will find those in the menu at the top right, will restart MPD. That also takes about five seconds.

To sum it up:
* Performance is excellent for anything that has to do with playback and playlist operations.
* Performance is good for operations that has to do with configuration changes.
* You may not enjoy the initial build of the library, but you're going to do that operation only once. I suggest that you connect your Raspberry Pi with an ethernet cable, at least when you initialize your library.

On a side note:
To achieve good results with Raspberry Pi sound-wise, you will also need a DAC. USB DACs are not a good match for the Raspberry Pi. If you are planning to use RuneAudio the same way as you're using your Western Digital, with optical out, I would recommend that you take a look at the HifiBerry Digi DAC. It's a DAC that is tailor made for the Raspberry Pi, that performs great for all files up to 24bit/192kHz.

If you don't need digital out, the HifiBerry DAC or IQ-Audio's Pi-DAC seem to be among the most popular choices. Again, for all formats up to 24bit/192kHz. The Pi-DAC would seem to have the best specs, at least on paper, and it includes a hardware volume control. They have different features though. I use the HifiBerry because it gives me an easy way to add an external power supply, and it sounds really great.

Supported i2s DACs in RuneAudio as of v 0.3-alpha

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 00.55.48.png (35.78 KiB) Viewed 3016 times

[matt]

On a side note:
To achieve good results with Raspberry Pi sound-wise, you will also need a DAC. USB DACs are not a good match for the Raspberry Pi. If you are planning to use RuneAudio the same way as you're using your Western Digital, with optical out, I would recommend that you take a look at the HifiBerry Digi DAC. It's a DAC that is tailor made for the Raspberry Pi, that performs great for all files up to 24bit/192kHz.

If you don't need digital out, the HifiBerry DAC or IQ-Audio's Pi-DAC seem to be among the most popular choices. Again, for all formats up to 24bit/192kHz. The Pi-DAC would seem to have the best specs, at least on paper, and it includes a hardware volume control. They have different features though. I use the HifiBerry because it gives me an easy way to add an external power supply, and it sounds really great.

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 00.55.48.png

Thanks for that, Rune sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. I am planning on using a PI B+ with the iqaudio Pi-DAC PLUS (no soldering), provided the wait time for the DAC PLUS isnt too long, and will only use the receiver as an amplifier.

[Midnight]

In my experience the RPi is painfully slow when browsing through the library database (not just the file structure) with clients like MPDroid. It can take up to 30 seconds when opening an artist to view the albums.
IIRC such a library browsing function will be added to the Runeaudio web ui, so this may be slow, too. Loading times are much faster with a Beaglebone Black, but still not what I call responsive.

Playback won't be a problem for the RPi.

[skrodahl]

Hi Matt,
I know what follows below can all sound quite confusing. If you weren't aware, RuneAudio can be controlled by a clean, well thought out web interface or by a client that talks to MPD directly.

Keep your setup as simple as possible. One Raspberry Pi with some kind of storage, with the audio output connected to an amplifier. There are lots of way to complicate it if you'd like, but there's no need if you don't have very complicated requirements.

If you are able to solder a small connector to your Raspberry Pi, I would strongly suggest that you go for the Raspberry Pi Model B, and not the B+. The reason is that RuneAudio doesn't have the correct drivers for the B+ yet. Maybe you know someone who can help you, or if you by some coincidence should happen to live in the south of Sweden (or the Copenhagen area) I can help you out.

In my experience the RPi is painfully slow when browsing through the library database (not just the file structure) with clients like MPDroid. It can take up to 30 seconds when opening an artist to view the albums.

Hi Midnight,
By a series of random incidents, I have had to reinstall RuneAudio 0.3-alpha and buy a new phone because my old one died on me. (Actually, I had two phones die in the same week...) Really, it's been that kind of a week.

So, as of yesterday, I had a pristine, fresh and shiny, completely untouched install. As I'm mostly using MPDroid (and MPad now and then) to control RuneAudio, I had no recollection of it being slow. Granted, I was using file view in MPDroid to make it behave like the RuneAudio web interface. It's just something I've become adjusted to over the years of handling the music library manually.

Now, I'm back to the default behavior of using the MPD library instead.

I see a little delay, perhaps up to one second, for artists that have a lot of albums and are featured in other albums placed somewhere else in the file structure. I'm using the highly scientific one-mississippi-two-mississippi method here, and it's always less than one-mississippi...

I'm not denying that you are experiencing this painful slowness. It could be related to the way MPD handles the database over time, the database may be corrupt in some way, your storage may be slower, perhaps the memory card in your Raspberry Pi is slow or corrupt in some way, or it can be related to network issues.

[Midnight]

Hi skrodahl,

how big is your collection?
I've experienced this delay on 2 different RPis and a BBB (while this one is faster). Tested in 2 different networks, while it works instant with my PC in the same network. Tested from 2 different smartphones and a tablet. Always the same: PC serves nearly instant, BBB takes some time, RPi takes an endless time. The RPi uses a Sandisk class 10 high speed memory card.

Only thing that comes to my mind: the devices also had to serve the album arts. But IIRC even without serving album arts the response is everything else than fast. After my experience I would not recommend a RPi for collections of 50k+ tracks.

[ACX]

If you are able to solder a small connector to your Raspberry Pi, I would strongly suggest that you go for the Raspberry Pi Model B, and not the B+. The reason is that RuneAudio doesn't have the correct drivers for the B+ yet.

This is true at this time, but 0.3-beta with I2S support for Rpi model B+ is on the way (matter of days), so you really don't have to worry about that. If you still have to buy everything, then opt for the model B+, no soldering and less power source related issues.

[skrodahl]

Hi skrodahl,

how big is your collection?

---8<---snip----8<---

Only thing that comes to my mind: the devices also had to serve the album arts. But IIRC even without serving album arts the response is everything else than fast. After my experience I would not recommend a RPi for collections of 50k+ tracks.

My music library has 28.828 songs in 2.754 albums. Nearly all of them FLAC. It grows only with new purchases of music, so I suspect I will never reach your library size. So I can't really tell if it is your library size that causes the performance hit.

While ripping my CD collection, I have been careful to have all tags in order. MPD can be picky when it comes to ID3-tags, especially if the track numbers are missing. This is a humongous task though, and it has taken me far too much time since I started dabbling with MPD last summer.

RuneAudio is displaying cover art, extracted from the ID3-tags, and it does not lag. I have set up my RuneAudio install to serve cover art as well, using the image file directly. It doesn't slow down anything, except that the cover art takes a few seconds to show up in MPDroid.

I used to run MPDroid in the Android runtime environment in BlackBerry 10, that didn't slow things down either. Which is why I'm in agreement with you that the client is not to blame. It's just talking to MPD over the network.

I discussed the library handling abilities of MPD earlier in this forum. It is, unfortunately, the biggest flaw in MPD. There doesn't seem to be any way of editing tags, you can't see what your latest additions are. There is no random play of your whole library (although RuneAudio is in the process of adding that). There doesn't seem to be anyway of rating music or see which tracks or albums are most played. So I'm using Subsonic to organize my library and to access my music when I'm outside of my home, and RuneAudio for playing music on my rig at home.