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The raspberry pi works well with a WiFi adapter as specified in the article. I havent tested any high rez files but with flac cd rips it works well. The best part is that it can also use airplay or upnp streaming when family wants to play spotify, etc.

I haven't tried high rez but cd quality works ok if the hard drive is powered by its own psu. I tried running a USB powered HD and that didn't work well. But, my first preference is to stream it via wired ethernet connection and second option is to stream via USB WiFi dongle. I connected my external drive to my WiFi routers USB input and used it as a simple NAS.

Thanks for the info. Will need to check it out one day.

I'm curious to hear more about this comparison and what makes it superior.

I have used the rapberry pi2 for a while now and really like it. I do, however, like the tablet or phone input better than using a remote and tv screen. My preference for audio only is using either volumio or the similar mood audio. I tried kodi (osmc) and that worked as well but found that the sound without any modifications was better in the dedicated audio players. With that said, I have read reports where people really like Kodi as well to play music. I'm not sure about this but I believe Kodi resample the output by default. The best part is that it is free to try either option and pick the software that works the best for you.

Did you see that a Volumio 2.0 is hopefully coming out soon. Looks promising: https://volumio.org/introducing-volumio-2/

Got my old ipad to work and streaming with airplays works great. The Moode player stops with a smooth transition when starting with airplay, but it doesn't swap back automatically -have to first turn off the airplay from the ipad. The extra step is no problem. What is the audio quality using the shairport? Transcoded using the Apple Lossless codec at 44100 Hz?

Tim - thanks for the info! Looked into the airfoil but a bit pricy to buy considering it costs almost just as much as the rpi. Any android solutions?

Looks nice. Any plans for adding support for spotify and other streaming services? I also noticed that the mpd pipe output plugin is not included. That would be a nice add.

Thats very generous of you -especially for the ones like me with limited knowledge how to do this! But you are correct, that would better fit in a separate thread. I will see if I can find an already existing thread for this or I will set up a new one. Btw - it is my understanding that volumio uses a webserver to run the interface, and there are programmed scripts to change the settings. It would be neat if custom scripts could be used and executed from volumio as well to set up for example dsp or to quickly run A/B tests to figure out best settings or change vpn settings.

To add to this - openelec is just a distro for the media center Kodi (osmc is another Kodi based solution for Raspberry) and it doesn't run MPD by default. There are addons that can be installed that let's Kodi be the client for MPD but I haven't tried it myself. My experience is also that the sound from Kodi is not as good as the MPD based solutions such as Volumio. I have seen some people posted that they have combined MPD and Kodi successfully on the same raspberry pi. Not sure with open elec but if using osmc you can access the terminal and install any programs (or edit mpd.conf) in the same way as you would with apt get on Ubuntu. Just to clairfy, volumio is a better audio only solution imo. The only issue I have with it is that I wish it had a volume limiter or use a plus or minus buttons to control thw volume since its easy to turn it too much by mistake. I'm using it with a dac with no hardware volume plugged straight into the amp with no preamp, so it can get painful If not being careful.

To add to this - openelec is just a distro for the media center Kodi (osmc is another Kodi based solution for Raspberry) and it doesn't run MPD by default. There are addons that can be installed that let's Kodi be the client for MPD but I haven't tried it myself. My experience is also that the sound from Kodi is not as good as the MPD based solutions such as Volumio. I have seen some people posted that they have combined MPD and Kodi successfully on the same raspberry pi.

Curious to learn more about the scripts you use. Anything that you can share or any good references you recommend?

Thanks for the great write-up. I have been playing with Volumio and RPi2 and liked the result a lot - got distracted for a while with using it as a KODI player, but want to move back to a pure audio solution using a DAC. I have been using it with the Hifimediy android dac (using an usb adapter which creates a cheap flexible solution for both phone and the RPI2), but now looking for an upgrade and trying to decide if going to i2S dac vs a USB dac. Any input audio quality on using either i2S or USB?