I just bought a Hifiberry DAC2 for my Raspberry Pi 4b and so far have been very pleased with how it works with Zynthian.
It did not work out-of-the-box. I set it up under the Hifiberry Dac+ configuration and got an error. At first, I thought it was because the RBPI audio was conflicting with it, but after checking the Disable RBPi Audio box it still didn’t work.
I finally figured out the problem when I entered the following in terminal:
aplay -l
No devices were returned. This indicated that the entire device wasn’t being recognized by the Raspberry Pi.
I then read on another post that you needed to run an rpi-update for this card to update the firmware:
sudo rpi-update
Once I did that, the new card immediately started working. I can tell a huge difference between the sound this is putting out versus what I had been getting earlier from a cheap USB soundcard.
I recorded a short track (“Wild World” by Cat Stevens) using the Zynthian audio recorder. The one question I have is, what is causing the occasional pops in the sound? Is that just likely some distortion from briefly going over the level?
Hi @tkc, you are experiencing xruns. Those clicks are small holes in the audio due to the audio engine not being delivered the audio data in time. This can be caused by an insufficient power supplier or inadequate power cable. It can also be triggered by too much processing, e.g a particularly resource hungry engine and/or effects.
You need to have a 3A PSU for the Raspberry Pi 4. Some PSU advertise 3A but fail to deliver this continuously. The cable needs to be high quality which usually equates to fairly thick, flexible cable. The thinner or stiffer cable tends to be less effective. There shouldn’t be anything to interfere with current flow, e.g. an inline switch will add impedance which will reduce current flow and result in low voltage at the Pi.
What engine did you use for your excellent rendition? Did you have any effects applied?
