Some feedback. I use a Consonance Box1.1 USB to PCM converter with coax to a Yulong D18 DAC. I have a squeezebox touch and use Foobar on linux and XP eee PC's. I have been playing with computer audio for about 6 months but consider myself a beginner still although I'm comfortable at a Linux command line. I regard myself as an audiophile, with vinyl my preferred medium. Playing Raspyfi redbook CD wav's from ram or local copies on its SD card or usb thumb drive sounds very good. Really, VERY, VERY, good sound. V1.0 worked out of the box. Excellent work and my thanks and appreciation goes to the developers.

Now, the downer is…I have tried every tweak I've read about here to get acceptable performance when streaming from my NAS or with Internet Radio (mtu size 1492/1024/746, ethernet buffers, ext4 commit parameters to reduce writing to SD card, cylinder aligning on a Sandisk Ultra card (the supposed 95MB/sec kind; renice'ing key process; stopping all unused processes/services;options snd-usb-audio nrpacks=1; different ethernet cables etc etc etc ). But no matter what I've tried, the performance is still affected (I presume) by the ethernet/usb contention problems inherent in the Pi's hardware (I using a recent Pi 512ram) ie. regular stutters/glitches/gaps (no popping or speaker/amp unfriendliness though).

I've minimised the problem as far as I reasonably can but WAV playback over the network, I'm sorry to say, is just not acceptable (regular stutters) and although Radio *nearly* gets there every few minutes it hiccups slightly. I can't prove it but I suspect its something to do with the kernel flushing/writing to the SD card. I have commit=120 in fstab and run the exact kernel parameters in the script here:

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/n…..-on-flash/

It "feels" like its a filesystem flushing thing -- when it stutters it sounds exactly the same and this happens regularly every few minutes (lasts for 5-15 secs, then its ok again). The length of time seems to correlate with the commit=value -- the larger I made this, the longer between the hiccups. I can't help but feel this unfortunate hardware issue of the ethernet sharing the usb means ethernet+usb dac is a no go at least until further improvements to the kernel can solve the problem. Because it sounds so good I've decided to copy my NAS's music folder to an external notebook drive and plug that directly into the Pi, using ethernet only for remote control via a web browser, and for radio.

Note I repeat, playback via ram or local copies is fine and sounds just wonderful. I've tried very hard to make this work well. Its sooo close, just sooo darned close. I'm also waiting on a better power supply (the current one IS a bit marginal, only 700ma; I don't want to use an ext. HD until the better 2A PS arrives) and will report back. Its entirely possible I suppose some of my problems might go away with a better PS, as some have reported.

Now some constructive suggestions for the interface (from most to least important to me):

* EAGERLY looking forward to more friendly ram playback functionality. Could be made the automatic mode i.e. ensuring the current/next few songs get copied to and played from ram, transparently, then greatness awaits the Pi (may not please DSD/HiRes freaks though; I'm 99% redbook for now and can fit 5-6 songs in the /run/shm partition)

* when browsing, it would be nice to always have the left arrow back button visible so when in a long scroll list so you can go back without scrolling up;

* when browsing, & at the very bottom of a list of album folders, the bottom 3 actions on the right are obscured and can't be accessed;

* I'd like the option of disabling all extra unused services from the interface (e.g. nfs, airplay, samba etc as I do my own mounts);

* I'd like the option of NOT requiring the "database" at all as I have a basic but effective hierarchical folder system to arrange my music and am happy to browse manually.

Hope this is of some assistance. I would suggest that for people who have ripped their collection to flac or use mp3, so the files are not as large as mine, they should not be put off by anything above. I'm also looking forward to a similar distro on a BeagleBox which does not have these hardware issues of the current Pi.

Many thanks once again. ess.