I was bored today so I decided to put together a raspberry fi with the pi and odac I have. Install was easy and I got it running in no time but there are some things I would like to see improved. I know this is a WIP so I am not expecting anything to change any time soon but these are things that I think would really improve the user experience.

Parts in setup

Odac
Raspberry pi
powered usb hub
belkin wifi dongle
32gb SD card
phone charger PS

1. Once everything is setup and running the web interface seems to crash/lose contact. This usually happens after I select a song to play. The song will continue to play but the web interface is unreachable. It just doesn't seem to be stable.

2. It would be nice if one of the LEDs could be triggered to let you know when raspberry fi is loaded. This could also be used to let the user know of problems as well

3. I have a 32gb sd card that I use with my pi. It would be nice if I could use the extra space on the card to hold music in lieu of connecting an external HD. I tried partitioning the extra space with windows and gparted. This led to two problems. The first was that the new partition was unmountable in windows, even if it was fat 32. The second problem is that when I tried to resize the fat32 boot partition, which required moving the ext2 partition around, I got errors. It might be possible to bypass this by making the boot partition the second partition which might allow it to be expanded without problems. A script that formated unpartitioned space and made that space mountable and ready for music after the first boot would be awesome.

4. Wicd-curses needs to be part of the distro. Needing to connect the pi to my router to setup wifi is an unneeded extra step.

5. It would be nice if you guys made this a proper distro so an apt-get update would bring you to the current version. If there is some reason this isn't reasonable, what about a script that would update the install from github or the like? If you could access this from the web interface that would be even better.

6. it would be nice if the network share interface as simplified. Not a big deal but it would make set up a lot easier.

7. A simple LCD + analog control button pannel would be awesome for stand alone use. Something like (https://www.adafruit.com/products/1110) or (https://www.sainsmart.com/sainsmart-3-2-tft-lcd-display-touch-panel-pcb-adapter-sd-slot-for-arduino-2560.html?___store=en&___store=en)

I'm not sure if you guys are looking for input like this but I hope it helps. I can't wait to see how well this thing runs after some more development