Come and say hello to Simone from RuneAudio team at AXPONA (Chicago, April 21-23, 2017)! You can find him in room 526, kindly hosted by auranas®.

We will be in on Saturday, 7 May. If you plan to attend in the same day or be around München in the weekend and you want to say us hello, please contact us!

We are proud to take part in one of the most important Audiophile events of the United States of America for the second year. Come and meet us in person! We will be kindly hosted by auranas® in room 526.

As usual, a big thank you goes to Frank Friedmann (aka hondagx35) who is helping us to keep the pace with the new platforms while we are focused on the development of the new version.

Download

Main features

• Player discovery – scan the local network for connected RuneAudio compatible players
• Fullscreen UI – RuneUI is displayed in true fullscreen, with no additional browser bars
• Volume control – adjust the volume with the physical buttons on your phone

Documentation

RuneAudio Remote Control official documentation

Credits

• Elliot Nathanson (elliotn on this forum) – main developer
• Andrea Coiutti (me) – design

The image was already posted in the forum some days ago, but both images are now officially available in the Download page:

A big thank you goes again to Frank Friedmann (aka hondagx35) who personally built the image and will be the maintainer of the ODROID platform (check the dedicated section in the forum).

Maker Faire is a global movement aiming to inspire, educate and entertain curious and creative minds of all ages. The Trieste Mini Maker Faire will bring together and uncover makers, inventors, scientists, crafters, artists and all other passionate creative enthusiasts from the Triveneto region of Italy as well as Slovenia, Croatia, Austria and beyond. While showing their projects, participants will also share their passion for making and inspire visitors to make things themselves. Special attention will be given to ideas and projects of educational interest and aimed at developing countries.

If you are around there, come and meet us in person! We will be kindly hosted by auranas® in room 526.

The Raspberry Pi 2 image was already posted in the forum for weeks, but both images are now officially available in the Download page:

A big thank you goes to Frank Friedmann (aka hondagx35) who personally built both images and will be the maintainer of the Cubietruck platform (check the dedicated section in the forum).

HAPPY 1st BIRTHDAY RUNEAUDIO!

It’s really exciting what we achieved in this time: the increasing quality of the project, the great community we have put toghether, the interest we generated around ARM platforms used for hi-fi purposes.

All this would have been impossible without you: we’d especially like to thank everyone who supported us along this adventure with donations, bug reports, feature requests, documentation drafts and many kudos.

Our commitment to maintain the quality of the project and deliver you the best audiophile experience from cheap hardware hasn’t change and is stronger than ever. The project roadmap is full of new features and improvements, and we hope to see you involved in the creation of something big.

Greetings from Udine, live at the Open Source Day 2014!

We will have a dedicated space for us (room M, along the main hallway) which will be used as a sort of listening room and showroom. We will bring a mini hi-fi setup built around some RuneAudio devices.

If you are around in the Udine area, this is a great opportunity to meet us and touch with your hands some of the embedded platforms and DACs we are supporting. Come to visit us!

List of expositors
List of conferences
General info: www.opensourceday.org.

After many months of hard work and sleepless coding nights, RuneUI has been majorly reworked (as previously disclosed in this post) with many sections and features being redesigned and rebuilt from scratch to achieve even better performance and usability.

Now that we have achieved the desired results, we feel that the time has come to officially unveil them to you.

Although this release is still marked with the -beta suffix, it can be considered stable and full-featured (those who participated in the 0.3-alpha testing already know that).

Below you can see some of the most significant new features introduced in this release.

Support of Raspberry Pi B+ and new I²S DACs

This release works great on Raspberry Pi model B+ and has out of the box support for Raspberry Pi’s most popular I²S DACs:

• G2Labs BerryNOS
• G2Labs BerryNOS mini
• HiFiBerry DAC and HiFiBerry DAC+
• HiFiBerry Digi and HiFiBerry Digi+
• IQaudIO Pi-DAC and IQaudIO Pi-DAC+
• RaspyPlay3 and RaspyPlay4
• Wolfson Audio Card

New Library home

User experience is enhanced by the Library home screen, which presents all the music sources at once and makes browsing even easier. You can also see the new integrated music streaming services: Spotify, Dirble and Jamendo:

Spotify integration

The highly requested Spotify Premium feature has been integrated into RuneAudio through the spop daemon, a great work of Thomas Jost (Schnouki). Spop has been completely integrated into RuneUI, with playback control, coverart support and playlist management.

Spotify is a good alternative for casual listening with streaming quality set to highest as default.

UPnP/DLNA

You can now use your RuneAudio devices as UPnP/DLNA media renderers with OpenHome support, thanks to the integration of upmpdcli, a great work of Jean-Francois Dockes.

Wi-fi configuration wizard

Under the Network section you’ll find an easy to use configuration wizard for the Wi-Fi connections.

Social sharing

Sharing your music (and your love for RuneAudio) is now as easy as pressing a button.

Disclaimer

This release is currently limited to Raspberry Pi, and also works well on the new model B+. Support for other platforms will come soon.

Although this version is a big leap forward compared with the previous 0.2-beta, some new bugs have come to light due to the huge rewrite of the code. In the beginning we were thinking in inviting a selected group of users in a sort of closed testing program, but at the end we decided to open it to everyone and involve the whole community (in the testing of the preliminary 0.3-alpha). All the precious feedback received has allowed us to identify the most critical bugs and fix them before the final release.

We invite you to continue to look for bugs and report them in this dedicated thread at our Raspberry Pi forum, in a polite and constructive way. It will help us identify the most critical ones and fix them for the next 0.4 release.

We already have updated the RuneUI repository on GitHub with the new source code of the UI, and the RuneOS repository with configs and packets. We have also published a cookbook listing all the steps to build the distro, to provide an useful resource for everyone who wants to actively contribute to this project.

To everyone who supported us with donations, bug reports, feature requests and many kudos: we would not have done it without you. Thank you!

Those who participated in the 0.3-alpha testing have already experienced the many improvements introduced from the 0.2-beta (some of them were anticipated in this blog post).

The 0.3-beta is a further improvement over the alpha which includes many bug fixes and some new interesting features such as the heavily requested Spotify Premium integration (official announcement here) and UPnP/DLNA capability with OpenHome support.

You can see the LONG full changelog here.

A huge thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to support us during development with feedback, suggestions, donations and every other kind of help. It has been very much appreciated.

Maker Faire is a global movement aiming to inspire, educate and entertain curious and creative minds of all ages. The Trieste Mini Maker Faire will bring together and uncover makers, inventors, scientists, crafters, artists and all other passionate creative enthusiasts from the Triveneto region of Italy as well as Slovenia, Croatia, Austria and beyond. While showing their projects, participants will also share their passion for making and inspire visitors to make things themselves. Special attention will be given to ideas and projects of educational interest and aimed at developing countries.

As we did at the Fiera del Radioamatore in Pordenone, we will bring a mini Hi-Fi equipment and a bunch of supported devices running RuneAudio for a live demontration – and a good music listening of course! In particular we will use the Raspberry Pi in combination with some I²S DACs (G2Labs BerryNOS mini, HiFiBerry DAC, HiFiBerry Digi, IQaudIO Pi-DAC and RaspI2SPlay3).

So come if you can and meet us in person!

Months have passed since we released the first version of our PlayerUI (that was its former name) in september 2013. We unveiled it under RaspyFi project in its 1.0 release, giving an important contribution to its huge popularity boost in that circumstance. Development went on under the new RuneAudio project, keeping the same design principles and usability vision, so more improvements and new features had been introduced in the two first releases.

At some point we felt that we had to stop for a while. It was time to take an hard decision: temporarily delay new feature development (we receive a lot of requests in that sense), and focus on a priority task. A deep under the hood rework of RuneUI was needed, before adding further work on the old code base.

The following article aims to be a preview of the big changes you will find in the next RuneAudio 0.3-beta release.

The front-end – rendering performance optimizations

The first step was done on the front-end side. The original CSS code was far from being optimized: I developed it in hurry and it was full of unusued rules, overwrites and performance-expansive proprieties. This resulted in bad rendering performances on under-powered tablets and mobile devices, and consequently a weak user experience. This had to be changed.

I decided to start with the upgrade of Twitter Bootstrap (the front-end framework on which the UI is built) to the last 3.1.0 version. Version 3.0 Bootstrap is responsive from its core, and comes with the approach of Mobile First:

Nearly everything has been redesigned and rebuilt to start from your handheld devices and scale up.

This new approach translates in a remarkable boost on layout and rendering performance. Structural choices in a CSS framework can have a tremendous impact on it, and Bootstrap went in the right direction with this, aiming to the important 60 FPS draw rate for scrolling and animation on every device.

Upgrading Bootstrap from 2.x to 3.x was not a quick task, because the 3.x version is not backward compatible: many class names and common markups had changed, so it forced me to review the entire HTML code in the templates. But the effort was worth the price, because the performance had a clear boost right after the switch.

The next move was to get rid of Flat UI, the Bootstrap theme we used to set the original look of the UI. That is a great piece of software, but we were using only a small fraction of its potential, therefore loading a lot of unusued CSS in the browser. I decided to rewrite those styles by myself, coding only the necessary ones.

At this point I had in front of me the opportunity to restart everything almost from scratch. I did what I was supposed to do from the beginning: I embraced LESS.

Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable.

LESS turned out wonderful: it let me recompile Bootstrap’s CSS choosing only the components I needed, and add my custom styles in a smart way. This was limiting code redundancy and rules overwrite. I could keep the source code well organized and modular, and quickly upgrade some parts or include others such Bootstrap third party addons. The final result is a compressed and much lighter compiled CSS, that makes page loading time faster and improves rendering performance.

The last step was the optimization of the Javascript code. This part was made together with Cristian Pascottini, who joined us as contributor and gave a big contribution in cleaning the code and rewriting some functions in a more efficient way. Welcome to RuneAudio and thank you!

The backend – mechanics optimizations

The second focus was put on backend side, on where the RuneUI interacts with the Music Player Daemon (MPD) . Simone De Gregori (Orion in the forum, co-founder of RuneAudio) is the master of that part.

We knew that standard Comet implementation of the PlayerUI was far from being perfect. Its Achilles’ heel was the php-fpm process management over multiple page views: too many PHP processes were spawn when requesting data updates from clients.

To contain this behaviour, a sort of rude control mechanism was introduced – the system daemon rune_wdog. When the total number of php-fpm processes was exceeding the maximum of 12 units, the daemon restarted the php-fpm service, bringing the total number of processes to the initial 5. The side effect of this mechanism was an increased system load, and in some borderline cases it could generate problems that were also affecting the playback quality.

After evaluating the possible options to solve the problem, Simone chose to use the Nginx Push Stream Module, a pure stream HTTP push technology that could be integrated in our Nginx existing setup. This required to recompile Nginx and properly set up the configuration of the channels. All the background mechanics of RuneUI were reworked to take advantage of the “full-push” technology offered by PushStream-module.

The results were as we had expected: much more stability (a fixed number of 4 PHP processes are now used to serve HTTP requests in all conditions), less latency in commands and updates of the UI, and higher general speed.

PHP-FPM (rel. 5.5.9) was also recompiled by activating only the necessary modules (integrated as static functions), and this resulted in an amazing performance boost of over 100%!

Backend / Frontend communication was improved introducing HTML5 Websockets, leaving COMET Long-polling technique only as a fallback to guarantee old browsers compatibility.

Simone finally integrated Plates, a native PHP template system that’s fast and easy to use and extend, with the aim to make the backend structure more rational and make the introduction of new features easier and quickier. That required to review the entire PHP code base, with the opportunity to clean and further optimize it, and all these operation contributed on an extra performance boost.

RuneAudio 0.3-beta is on the way

As you could see in the screenshots along this post, we already introduced many cosmetic and UX improvements. We are currently working on introducing new interesting features and polishing the last details. The next RuneAudio 0.3-beta release is on the way, so be ready to put your hands on the shiny new RuneUI 1.3.

Probably the biggest news of this version is that Beaglebone Black has been added as certified working device. Finally USB storage automount has been introduced, and it supports FAT32, exFAT, NTFS and HFS+ file systems. Network mounts over NFS protocol are now possible (and suggested in most cases). Airplay playback is now working via ShairPort. And finally a good news for Raspberry Pi users: analog output is now selectable in MENU > MPD in RuneUI, although it’s still buggy (we applied a temporary and not perfect fix, hoping hope to solve it before the next release).

RuneUI has also been updated to 1.2 version, with some relevant changes here too: Album art visualization has been introduced in the main playback screen (as you can see in the screenshot below) and Last.FM scrobbling is now configurable under MENU > Settings (please make sure you put the correct credentials, otherwise it won’t work).

System has been generally improved in speed and stability.

As usual, we invite you to tell us your test experience in our forum.

A final note: we left some developer tools inside the image for debug – we’ll remove them from the next version, making the image lighter.

We took the Raspberry Pi as launch platform, first of a list of single-board computers that we are going to support (BeagleBone Black, CuBox and UDOO are on the way). We assembled the first version of RuneOS and optimized it to get the most performance out of the Raspberry Pi, and improved the interaction between RuneUI and the underlying system.

This is a testing release, and it’s limited to a basic setup: it only features wired ethernet connection, it only plays music from Network Attached Storage and only outputs to USB audio interfaces. So you’ll have to wait next release for a full featured system with Wi-Fi support, USB sources, webradio streaming and management, and analogic or HDMI output. We have temporarily left out all these features to focus development on system performance and sound quality.

We invite you to try it and give us your feedback in our forum.

As the release name suggests, it’s still a beta version, missing some interesting features we previously planned to include. For the same reason we currently focused the RuneUI development only on one platform, the Raspberry Pi. BeagleBone Black, CuBox and UDOO will come soon too.

The release is planned for the first week week of december. We are looking for betatesters, so if you own a Raspberry Pi and want to help us, please tell us in our forum.

Stay tuned!

We are going to talk about which goals the project is aiming to, why RuneAudio project is born, and how we built RuneUI and RuneOS.
If you are around in the Udine area then come and join us in our first official public event!

More information at the official website: www.opensourceday.org.

RuneAudio is a free and open source software with a goal: to transform an embedded platform (a cheap, silent and low-consumption mini-PC) into an Hi-Fi digital music player. It offers a lot of features and aims to be easy to use, flexible and future-proof.

RuneAudio is brought to you by RuneAudio team, a group of friends living in Udine, Italy, with a common passion of computer audio and software coding.