I started this project so I could have a better understanding and control over my music reproduction system. I mainly use streaming services due to the endless number of available tracks and music albums. I truly believe that if its done right digital reproduction of music and audio streaming can result in great way to listen to music. Done right means first and far most a Bit Perfect digital path from the source (the network or storage device) to the sink (e.g. a Digital Audio Converter).
A good quality audio streamer is a must in every audiophile system that wants to enjoy any streaming service out there, but streaming and software will not suffice. You have to put and build the hardware and components to match. Every part of your system has to be built and setup in the correct way - from the power wall outlet (maybe even before that) to the speakers.
When I first started using TIDAL as a streaming service I used a Fanless Passively cooled PC with a Windows operating system to run the TIDAL application. Needless to say that was just a start and eventually I realized that this is not the way to go. Using a general purpose OS for a streaming PC is not ideal for many reasons. I decided to move to a Linux based OS and (Ubuntu) so I would be able to customize it more easily. TIDAL does not support a native Linux application (a browser is not an option for me) so I decided to install Mopidy and the Mopidy-Tidal extension to test drive it. It worked great and together with the Mopidy-Iris player UI I had a complete streaming software stack.
I lived with this setup for quite a while and than I started tweaking it and playing around, for one thing I wanted to make sure I got Bit Perfect audio in the whole audio pipeline and so on, all these tweaks and hacking to the system lead me to the conclusion I could share it with the rest of the Audiophile community and even better build a complete Open Source Linux distribution that will include all these changes I made - and this is how HiFiStreamer was born.
The project is hosted on GitHub and the images of the software are available in the Download page here and in the Release page of the repository. For any comments or suggestion please use the GitHub issue tracking system.
Stay tuned and listen …