Creating a high-quality audio platform with Volumio

Volumio is a wonderful open source alternative to the iTunes straightjacket. For audiophile geeks who happen to be microcomputer or electronic geeks (you know who you are!) and RPi enthusiasts in particular, Volumio is well-known for its fastidiousness at serving up high-quality audio, be it web-based radio or high-resolution audio files. The system has now been ported to the BBB from its earlier incarnation as RaspyFi.

Essentially, Volumio leverages a Linux music server called Music Player Daemon (MPD). MPD provides a client environment with a web-centric GUI (sans plugins) and a robust networking architecture to serve your audio files.

One of the many appealing aspects of Volumio is that it is (nearly) file-agnostic, so you can play virtually any audio file type within the environment. For now, this includes FLAC, WAV, MP3, AAC, ALAC, M4A, and playlist (PLS) files.

Each new version of Volumio seems to leap forward in stability and ease of...