Using the DC-1 with various software (players)

[wm64]

Hi there,
I'm using my DC-1 with a Raspberry PI for streaming music from a NAS and the Internet via UPnP.
The setup is described here: volumio.org/get-started/.  Volumio is nothing special, it relies on the Linux MPD music player daemon.

As described in several  forums on Raspberry PI and Linux audio, there are problems with C-Media USB devices (as used in DC-1 apparently).  Personally, I don't think the problem is in the driver but somewhere in MPD, perhaps in the flac decoder, but it is related somehow to the USB device.  Maybe it's a buffering or timing issue.

I can play 16/44 flac files okay but 24/96 files have popping and crackling and 24/88 files are just noise.  I converted some 24/96 flac files to wav and it worked okay.  I also used an alternative Linux player (mplayer) and everything worked fine (except mplayer doesn't have a nice UPnP interface).  This is why I think the problem is related to decoding, not drivers.

My solution has been to configure the MPD to decode everything to 16/44 which is not ideal but still produces high quality audio.

Anyone else have experience configuring an MPD-based player on Linux?

[garbulky]

Hi wm!
Try these two things
Turn the power off from the back. Wait about 30 seconds. Then turn the power back on.
If this doesn't work. Go to the setup menu in the dac itself pushing in one of the knobs and where it says ASRC asynchronous choose synchronous instead.

In the streamer device software see if you can increase the buffer size. If your device has an option for "push" and "event". Select the one that is not selected and see if that makes a difference.
Also you may need to install the USB audio class 2 driver on to your system first.

A final option that probably won't help is in the DAC setup menu itself choose USB 1.1. However this will limit you to 16/44 only. Since you said this works anyway, this is probably not useful.

[wm64]

Hi,

thanks for your suggestions. I tried both things but it made no difference. I had already tried turning off the ASRC and I was quite hopeful but it doesn't make any difference.

I guess I will have to delve into the buffer settings in the Linux ALSA audio drivers. Or else just replace the Raspberry PI with another cheap device that doesn't have the same issues (there are forum posts all over the internet about problems with RPI audio).

In the mean time, 16/44 is still fine for me.