Everyone was thrilled when the new Raspberry Pi 2 was announced earlier this week



And so did I! And you should be really happy that Volumio Audiophile Music Player is now available for Raspberry Pi 2!

Let’s take a moment to review what the benefits are with this new board iteration:

Quad Core ARM v7 CPU @ 900MHz (Foundation claims it to be 6x more powerful)

1GB of RAM instead of 512 MB

Full compatibility with Accessories and Software of V1.

What they basically did was replace the BCM2825 SoC with a newer and more powerful BCM2836, and adding a 1GB elpida DDR2 RAM module on the bottom of the board. The remaining parts of the board remain unchanged.

You can see an interesting performance comparison here.

For those of you wondering if the new Raspberry Pi 2 will suffer from the same USB issues: yes, the Ethernet is still over USB (like every single board computer out there) so we’ll need to test the new drivers behaviour extensively to see if the notorius #1 bug on PI has been solved.

Now, let’s see what you can get using Volumio and Raspberry Pi 2 as a music player:

35 dollar Hardware, the most inexpensive one

Way more power than Volumio needs

Full compatibility with I2s DACs (Hifiberry, IQ-Audio and others) up to 24\192 playback

Extra RAM for RAMPlay function

I’ll cover a bit more extensively the hardware capabilities of the Raspberry PI 2 in a future post

And here is what you get with Volumio 1.55:

Compatible with Raspberry Pi, Rasbperry Pi B+ and Raspberry PI 2

I2s DAC compatibility with Raspberry PI 2 (Hifiberry Dac Plus, IqAudio Dac Plus and others)

Better Spotify handling: new Spop daemon version and search by Name or Artist

USB DAC hotplugging is now supported

USB Storage can be used on the fly, and you’re not required to reboot any more

As usual, you can download the new version at the DOWNLOAD PAGE and leave your comments and feedbacks on the Specific Forum Thread

And while downloading, take a look at the great Android Companion Apps for Volumio!

Enjoy!