I’ve slowly been setting up a music server to preserve my music files. The iMac I’ve currently to serving up my music was bought back in 2016, and while I’ve only had two problems with it, I’m wary of depending on it. One problem is that for some reason, the iTunes app running on Mac OS 10.4 stopped working and got replaced with the Music app. The Music app, while much improved by Apple from when it first came out, is not anywhere as full-featured as iTunes was. One thing I really miss was the remote control app, amusingly called Remote. As far as I can tell, there’s no replacement.

On the Raspberry Pi 4, I’ve installed an app called mpd. It’s a music server that, as far as I can tell, is the most full-featured one available. Hopefully it can serve the Apple format files that make up most of the 24,000 tracks that I’ve acquired. I hope that if everything works as planned, I’ll also add to my phone client software that interacts with mpd so that I can control mpd remotely.

I’ve also bought an audio hat to output a decent stereo signal to my AV receiver, because it seems that the stereo signal from the Pi is lacking, it having only a mini trs plug.  The audio hat, the HifiBerry DAC2 Pro, seems to output a decent signal and has a separate input jack that does ADC.

As an extra added bonus, I’ve also bought a Zigbee control hat, a RaspBee II – The Universal Raspberry Pi Zigbee Gateway to replace the Philips Hue bridge to control the Philips lights I have in my house. Philips recently changed the TOS for the Hue bridge to enable them to spy on their customers. No way will I agree to the new terms. Hopefully I’ll be able to install this hat on top of the other gear so that I don’t have to set up another Raspberry Pi.