HiFiBerryOS got bigger

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HiFiBerryOS got bigger

We have released a new version of HiFiBerryOS. You might notice that the images got bigger than before. While it’s only 4 weeks since the last release, a lot of things have been added.

These are the important features of the new version:

Convenience switching
This seems to be a very simple feature, but we spent a lot of time to implement this.
An integrated controller makes sure, concurrent players work well with each other and the latest player automatically becomes active. Let’s see an example: You’re listening to a web radio station and you now start playback of a song in Spotify. You don’t have to think about stopping the web radio station first. The audio controller will automatically pause your web radio playback. You want to go back to the radio station? Just start playback again and Spotify will be paused automatically.
Metadata/cover art support
You can now see what’s playing – independent from the source. As long as the source supports information of artist, title and cover art, you can see it on the integrated web server. Right now, this is a very basic interface that just shows you the current song and allows you to play/pause/skip. We plan to improve this in the future and add more features.
MPD web interface
A simple web interface for mpd allows you full control. While mpd integration is still very basic, it’s relatively easy now to use to e.g. to listen to web radio stations
LastFM support
HiFiBerryOS retrieves missing metadata from Last.FM. It also allows you to scrobble to LastFM (or LibreFM if you prefer an open alternative).
Update infrastructure
To upgrade, you have to write HiFiBerryOS to an SD card on your computer. But this will be the last time you have to do this. We now integrated an updater that allows you to update to future releases without removing the SD card. This took us some time to make sure it is robust. The updater always keeps the last version of HiFiBerryOS on your SD card to make sure you can switch back if the upgrade fails. Even if you remove power during the update, the current version will still work fine.
Better sound quality
We improved the backend to run at a higher sample rate and use a better algorithm to mix multiple sources.
Improved robustness
Unfortunately software isn’t always perfect. Sometimes, a part of the distribution might become unresponsive or just crash. HiFiBerryOS detects this on multiple levels and restarts the failed component.
More supported platforms
We added support for the Pi Zero W and the Pi 2. Unfortunately the Pi Zero won’t support Roon as it’s CPU is missing some features we require for Roon. If you need a small system that can run Roon, go for the Raspberry Pi 3A+.

The following services are supported:

Airplay
Analog input on the DAC+ ADC
Bluetooth
Logitech Media Server
MPD
Roon
Spotify

As before, HiFiBerryOS is open source that allows you to add more features or change things you don’t like. You can find the full sources at Github. We’re working on more documentation that should allow you do find your way through the numerous source packages and configurations. Do you want to help us improving parts? Just contact us! Did you find a bug? Please post it at Github!

This pictures shows the metadata display