Raspberry Pie - tipps and tricks

Music

The internal sound of the raspi is not very good. There are several add-on solutions on the market.

First I tried the Wolfson Pie Audio Card.

But it does not work well:

You need a special kernel with drivers.
Because of its form the PCB fits not on all Raspi boards.
Only for Raspberry Pi A or Raspberry Pi B, not for Raspberry Pi A+, B+ and 2B
The mixer software is very complicated.
It does not fit in any case.

Then I bought a USB soundcard, HiRes USB-DAC SABRE 24/96 mit ES9023. It can ordered from Amazon

A driver to this adapter is in the Raspbian kernel. It is detected with lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1852:7022 GYROCOM C&C Co., LTD

To play music, you have to add some additional parameter to command line programs:

Play a wav file:
Important is the -D hw:0,1 Device
aplay -D hw:1,0 a.wav
Play a mp3 file:
Similar device parameter for mpg123
mpg123 -a hw:1,0 a.mp3
Change the volume:
To give the volume percentage to 65 percent you have to use following command
amixer -c 1 sset 'PCM' 65%