This Instructable will show you how to turn your Raspberry Pi in a Hi-Fi music player with surprising sound quality when used in combination with an USB DAC.

We are going to introduce here RuneAudio, a free and open source software that we developed to replace the personal computer as digital source with a dedicated, cheap, silent and low-consumption board, running a custom-build Linux distribution. It's a new-born project but it already offers many features, it is under active development and it counts on a fresh but growing community.



As many other open source projects, RuneAudio came out from personal needs: we all were using a laptop as digital source before, but we weren’t happy about absolute sound quality and ease of use. Our girlfriends didn’t like it either, as messing around with laptop and cables in the living room was dramatically lowering the WAF of our Hi-Fi systems :) We thought that our work could be useful for many other people out there with the same needs, so we set up an open source project, encouraging people to download it for free and to contribute to the development.



RuneAudio project has two main and clear goals.

Our first goal is sound quality: we are working hard to get the best results from the Raspberry Pi and the other supported platforms, using Arch Linux as the base of our RuneOS and optimizing it as best we can for audio reproduction.

Our second main goal is to make it easy to use for everyone, so we developed a handly web interface (RuneUI) who lets users control the playback and system settings with absolute no need to use Linux command line. The web interface is cross-platform and responsive (it adapts to screen size), making it accessible from every kind of device (desktop computers, notebooks, tablets and smartphones). The installation process is as easy as writing an .img file to your SD card.



So let's begin with the (short) quick start guide.

