ogg & moode

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Phil35

Well, you're starting with old vinyl (good on you, BTW) so you might try just transcoding the ogg files you already have.  I suspect you won't notice any difference in result than if you make FLAC files directly from the vinyl. (Those 'pops' I hear aren't going to go away!).

Since moOde comes with ffmpeg baked in, you can even do this conversion from the command line. In the following I let ffmpeg infer the input and output encodings from the filename extensions I used but you can also force this explicitly. As well, there's many other options possible---ffmpeg is the Swiss Army knife of the A/V world.

Code:

pi@m82p3a:~ $ ffmpeg -hide_banner -i "Many rivers to cross - face A.ogg" "Many rivers to cross - face A.flac"
Input #0, ogg, from 'Many rivers to cross - face A.ogg':
 Duration: 00:03:04.21, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 167 kb/s
   Stream #0:0: Audio: vorbis, 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 160 kb/s
   Metadata:
     DATE            : 1975
     track           : 1
     ALBUM           : Many rivers to cross
     TITLE           : Many rivers to cross
     ARTIST          : Jimmy Cliff
Stream mapping:
 Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (vorbis (native) -> flac (native))
Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
[flac @ 0x120c0b0] encoding as 24 bits-per-sample
Output #0, flac, to 'Many rivers to cross - face A.flac':
 Metadata:
   encoder         : Lavf58.45.100
   Stream #0:0: Audio: flac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s32 (24 bit), 128 kb/s
   Metadata:
     DATE            : 1975
     track           : 1
     ALBUM           : Many rivers to cross
     TITLE           : Many rivers to cross
     ARTIST          : Jimmy Cliff
     encoder         : Lavc58.91.100 flac
size=   34054kB time=00:03:04.22 bitrate=1514.3kbits/s speed=28.6x    
video:0kB audio:34046kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 0.023773%

The resulting FLAC file plays very nicely over my RPi -> (internal BT) -> JBL speaker with no changes to default audio/mpd settings.

I very much like my Creative Technology BT-W2 adapter for various reasons:

• it provided bluetooth output to the RPi 2B I was first using with moOde
  
• it presents to Linux/ALSA/moOde as an audio output device so no futzing with the Bluetooth renderer is necessary.
  
• it does the audio -> bluetooth conversion in firmware which offloaded some computation from those early RPi models.
  
• it also implements aptX in firmware which was important for me because my headphones accept aptX encoded audio. (This might not be so important now that one can compile aptX into Bluez-alsa, although Tim cannot distribute it since it's not FOSS.)
  
• even with an RPi with an internal BT transceiver, using the BT-W2 puts the antenna outside the metal case I like using.
  

Of course, pairing and connecting with a BT speaker is different with this device, as described in CreativeTech docs. My old BT-W2 works well but the BT-W4 looks even better on paper. I might have to move up.

YMMV.


Regards,
Kent