PulseAudio as with everything else sound related in Linux seems to be sporadically documented and there is also a lot of out of date information floating around. It has its fans and detractors, but is generally well supported in modern distributions with Raspbian being no exception. There have been a lot of different sound servers over the years in Linux, one of the more recent ones is PulseAudio. Unfortunately only a single device can use ALSA at a time, so for the audio nirvana we’re aiming for we need to make use of a sound server. Using ALSA directly is nice and simple and should simply work everywhere if aplay worked above. The guys over at The Raspyfi Project have made a rather extensive list of optimisations they’ve made to the stock Raspbian image. I’ve enabled it to no noticeable effect other than to remove some error messages that were showing up rather frequently in the kernel log. There is a kernel module option to reduce the latency and help increase the quality of the USB audio output. Playing something through the DAC is simply a case of telling aplay which device to use: aplay -D plughw:1,0 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Left.wavĪplay -D plughw:1,0 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wavĪplay -D plughw:1,0 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****Ĭard 0: ALSA, device 0: bcm2835 ALSA Ĭard 1: DAC, device 0: USB Audio Ĭard 1: DAC, device 1: USB Audio You can list the available audio devices: ~ $ aplay -l The first step after plugging the DAC in is to try and play something. I wasn’t in the market for something audiophile, but I can certainly hear the difference in audio quality compared to the audio jack on my laptop. There are a lot of USB DACs available to suit all budgets and quality requirements. The Raspberry Pi has two USB ports and Raspbian has USB audio support available in the kernel out of the box. The on-board sound out of the Raspberry Pi is not intended to be high quality and for me wasn’t even close to reasonable for a HiFi experience. Using PulseAudio has allowed me to achieve all of these goals as well as providing a few additional benefits.

My goal for this project was to be able to chuck audio at the Raspberry Pi from: Most of these setups are focussing on a single audio source.

Crackle-free audio on the Raspberry Pi with mpd and PulseAudio.

Turn a Raspberry Pi Into an AirPlay Receiver for Streaming Music in Your Living Room.

There are a lot of people out there doing similar things, and thanks to all for providing various hints and tips to get me going: I’ve not had a speaker setup to listen to music on for many years – it’s almost exclusively been on headphones, mostly on my phone, for far too many years now. I finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi and my first project has been to make a good quality music player.

Install pulseaudio raspberry pi