I recently unearthed a couple of old Rasberry Pi 1 Model B units equipped with HifiBerry DAC HATs. It’s been a couple of years since I tinkered with them, so I decided to see if I could get them to play music.

I was able to get everything up and running using Pi MusicBox, which provides just about everything one needs to run a music player on a Rasperry Pi. If you just want something that works out of the box, Pi MusicBox is fantastic.

However, I wanted to leverage the newer Raspian release, Jessie. And I wanted to configure everything myself.

  1. Download Latest Jessie Lite Image
  2. Install Image
  3. Boot Raspberry Pi
  4. Login to Raspberry Pi. SSH wasn’t running for me on first boot, so I had to use a keybord and monitor.
  5. Become root sudo -i (so you don’t have to prefix all subsequent commands with sudo).
  6. Configure Pi using raspi-config. I enabled SSH, changed the root password, set locale and set timezone.
  7. Install vim (for editing text). apt-get install vim.
  8. Upgrade firmware. Those familiar with Raspian will likely know about the rpi-update firmware update utility. I found that it wasn’t installed by default in Raspian Jessie Lite. apt-get install rpi-update did the trick. Running rpi-update updated the firmware to the current version. This probably wasn’t necessary, but I wanted to be current. I rebooted after this, then used SSH to continue the process. Avahi was installed by default, so I was able to reach the Pi on my network using raspberrypi.local. ssh pi@raspberrypi.local.
  9. Configure HifiBerry. Update /boot/config.txt to enable HifiBerry and disable default audio. Comment out the dtparam=audio=on setting. Add dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac. Save file and reboot (or you can reboot after installing mopidy if you can’t afford extraneous reboots).
  10. Install Mopidy. The Mopidy docs are great. Just follow the instructions
  11. Configure Mopidy. I wanted to run Mopidy as a service, so I edited the config file at /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf. See my mopidy.conf. There’s quire a bit going on here. See inline comments for more details.
  12. Install Mopify HTTP frontend.

My config files