Post by sondale on Sept 3, 2018 15:44:08 GMT
The piCorePlayer (pCP) is a music player designed to run wholly in the memory of a RaspberryPi; the operating system is based on TinyCore and the two functional parts of pCP are Logitech Media Server (LMS) and Squeezelite (SQL but obviously not the SQL language).
In the past I have used Logitech Squeezeboxes and Touch which meant I was familiar with LMS; when Logitech dropped all the Squeeze devices people looked around for replacements for them and eventually ported the software onto the Raspberry Pi.
LMS allows access to music files wherever they are stored (USB drive, NAS device etc) and has many apps to access streamed music (Spotify, Qobuz, Internet radio et al); Squeezelite is the music player hooking up to dacs. There are Apps for running pCP from various devices and it can be run from any web-browser.
Although both LMS and SQL can be run on the same RPi I tend to run them on seperate boxes. Communication between the parts of the system can be hard-wired or using WiFi - I have mine running on the home network which for the most part uses TPLink Gigabyte routers.
pCP is free but donations are welcome - please note I have absolutely nothing to do with the people writing and supporting the various programs - details of the supported devices and packages can be found at forums.slimdevices.com
pCP have just released version 4.0.0 which can be found at www.picoreplayer.org/
One of the first you notice about pCP (assuming you have downloaded one of the many other players) is how small it is - download takes seconds and not much longer to burn to an SD card - on my MAC I use SDFormatter to clear the SD cardand ApplePi-Baker to burn the image.
Startup of the RPi takes less than 30 seconds - you may notice when you setup pCP that for a reboot it automatically sets the restart timer to 30 seconds but it has usually rebooted in half that time.
There is one thing that puts people off pCP and that is it shows its Linux roots - there are a lot of things that you CAN do if you either know Linux / Unix or are willing to learn a little BUT you can setup the software without having to get your hands dirty! The people on the SlimDevices forum are incredibly helpful (and patient!) as I have found when trying new things.
Is it worthwhile? For me the answer is Yes, I like the fact that you have a pared-down operating system which still has as many features as other players but fits into memory. Whenever you make changes thay are stored on the SD card immediately and therefore on unexpected shutdowns no data is lost and the card is not corrupted. I have only had one failure and that involved me managing to physically bend the card whilst assembling the case!!
Sound-wise I like it a lot - I have been running pCP based systems for a few years and I have been tempted by other offerings but I have always returned to this setup.
I will describe my setup in the next post.
In the past I have used Logitech Squeezeboxes and Touch which meant I was familiar with LMS; when Logitech dropped all the Squeeze devices people looked around for replacements for them and eventually ported the software onto the Raspberry Pi.
LMS allows access to music files wherever they are stored (USB drive, NAS device etc) and has many apps to access streamed music (Spotify, Qobuz, Internet radio et al); Squeezelite is the music player hooking up to dacs. There are Apps for running pCP from various devices and it can be run from any web-browser.
Although both LMS and SQL can be run on the same RPi I tend to run them on seperate boxes. Communication between the parts of the system can be hard-wired or using WiFi - I have mine running on the home network which for the most part uses TPLink Gigabyte routers.
pCP is free but donations are welcome - please note I have absolutely nothing to do with the people writing and supporting the various programs - details of the supported devices and packages can be found at forums.slimdevices.com
pCP have just released version 4.0.0 which can be found at www.picoreplayer.org/
One of the first you notice about pCP (assuming you have downloaded one of the many other players) is how small it is - download takes seconds and not much longer to burn to an SD card - on my MAC I use SDFormatter to clear the SD cardand ApplePi-Baker to burn the image.
Startup of the RPi takes less than 30 seconds - you may notice when you setup pCP that for a reboot it automatically sets the restart timer to 30 seconds but it has usually rebooted in half that time.
There is one thing that puts people off pCP and that is it shows its Linux roots - there are a lot of things that you CAN do if you either know Linux / Unix or are willing to learn a little BUT you can setup the software without having to get your hands dirty! The people on the SlimDevices forum are incredibly helpful (and patient!) as I have found when trying new things.
Is it worthwhile? For me the answer is Yes, I like the fact that you have a pared-down operating system which still has as many features as other players but fits into memory. Whenever you make changes thay are stored on the SD card immediately and therefore on unexpected shutdowns no data is lost and the card is not corrupted. I have only had one failure and that involved me managing to physically bend the card whilst assembling the case!!
Sound-wise I like it a lot - I have been running pCP based systems for a few years and I have been tempted by other offerings but I have always returned to this setup.
I will describe my setup in the next post.
