Force music play on turn on

[Tim Curtis]

Why exactly doesn't the DAC turn on?

From what I understand, the Apple Home plug powers on the Pi, which in turn can power the DAC on via the USB, but it looks like the USB is not live (5V I mean) until the Pi plays something... I don't think this is a prerogative of the Pi-Zero.

1. How do you manually turn the DAC on, then, by pressing a button on it? Is there the possibility that the Topping turns indeed ON, but in sleep-mode, and this can be changed in its settings?

2. How can you have the Pi play from Spotify if you do not cast something from your phone? Doesn't it (casting from the phone) force the Pi to play, and hence the DAC to wake up?

Correct!

1) Yes, via button or remote, and it turns ON in "sleep-mode".

2) That's the main problem I have. I can connect to "Spotify Connect", but when I press play on Spotify it "drops" the connection to moode in Spotify Connect (but the DAC wakes up at that moment). But then I am forced to login into moode and restart the "Spotify Connect" render service in order to be able to connect again from the iPhone to Spotify in order to play music.

The Spotify Connect implementation (librespot) doesn't have a failover capability if the connection to the audio device gets interrupted, it just crashes or hangs. This failure case doesn't occur for most audio devices because they maintain their connection to the host.