RuneAudio working with HifiBerry Amp+ on RaspberryPi

This is a record of how I managed to the RuneAudio v0.3-beta software working with the excellent Hifiberry Amp+. The lads at runeaudio say that software release v0.4 will support Amp+ ‘out of the box’ but v0.3-beta doesn’t and they won’t/can’t say when v0.4 of the software will be released, however with some messing it can be made to work – which is great.

I really like runeaudio, and the sound quality with Hifiberry Amp+ and 2 venerable Monitor Audio speakers is really very good!

Anyway, all of the information required to setup runeaudio to work with the Amp+ can be found in bits and pieces on the runeaudio forum thatnks to everybody there! These steps worked for me during April 2015.

I found I had to add or modify a few steps so I will detail this here. These steps worked for me, but please backup before you proceed in case something goes wrong! To get going first install the runeaudio software for the raspberry pi.

The main set of steps to get Amp+ working can be found in this post by d2000:

http://www.runeaudio.com/forum/hifiberry-amp-t545.html

I just had to add a step or two as follows:

a.) Perform step 1.

b.) Execute:

pacman-db-upgrade

to update the database, this is a new step. Without this I got an error message when I tried to run step 2.

c.) Perform Steps 2 to 13

d.) Edit /boot/config.txt again and place the following line at the end of the file:

dtoverlay=hifiberry-amp

If you reboot at this stage you may find that browsing to runeaudio’s home page produces a 404 error (I did), we fix this in the next step as detailed in this post.

e.) Edit /usr/lib/systemd/system/redis.service and replace its contents with:

[Unit]
Description=Advanced key-value store
After=network.target
[Service]
#Type=forking
User=redis
PIDFile=/run/redis/redis.pid
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /var/lib/redis
ExecStart=/usr/bin/redis-server /etc/redis.conf
ExecStop=/usr/bin/redis-cli shutdown
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
StartLimitInterval=30
StartLimitBurst=20
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

f.) Reboot

g.) Visit runeaudio, go to the Settings page and choose ‘HiFiBerry Amp’ in the ‘I²S kernel modules’ drop-down and click apply settings.

h.) Go to the runeaudio’s MPD page and choose ‘snd_rpi_hifiberry_amp’ in the ‘Audio output Interface’ drop-down.

i.) Check that ‘Volume Control’ setting is ‘Enabled – Software’

j.) Reboot

When the system restarts you should be able to play music with software volume control, you will find that hardware volume control won’t work with this set-up, the volume keeps popping back to 100 when you try to set it!

Hardware Volume Control

To get hardware volume control working I did the following, based on the advice in this post:

a.) Execute the following to list the configured sound devices:

aplay -l

The output will look something like this:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: sndrpihifiberry [snd_rpi_hifiberry_amp], device 0: HifiBerry AMP HiFi tas5713-hifi-0 []
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Try to figure out which is yours, you can see from the output above that mine is device 0, sub-device 0.

b.) Edit /etc/mpd.conf and replace the ‘audio_output’ section at the end with the following, changing the values for ‘device’ and ‘mixer_device’ to match yours:

audio_output {
        name            "snd_rpi_hifiberry_amp"
        type            "alsa"
        device          "hw:0,0"
        mixer_type      "hardware"
        mixer_control   "Master"
        mixer_device    "hw:0"
        mixer_index     "0"
        auto_resample   "no"
        auto_format     "no"
        enabled         "yes"
}

d.) When runeaudio reboots it will revert the changes in mpd.conf so you have to prevent it by making the file read-only, do this at your own peril!

chattr +i /etc/mpd.conf

Then reboot, when the system restarts you should have hardware volume control and nicer sound, you will have to turn the volume up above 20 to hear it.

Links:
Thanks to all at the runeaudio forum!

http://www.runeaudio.com/forum/hifiberry-amp-t545.html
http://www.runeaudio.com/forum/getting-404-not-found-nginx-1-4-7-t909.html
http://www.runeaudio.com/forum/hifiberry-amp-volume-t1078.html