the audio streaming series

House keeping

I received several notifications from folks out there related to sKit and its evolution.

I'd like to lay out the (my) overall situation a bit more.

It took me more than 4 (rather exhausting) months to align my own Raspberry PI OS to the latest developments
on the software side and the HW side (RPi5). It took me 3 weeks to get the RPi kernel folks
involved in and motivated fixing the broken Allo drivers on the RPi5. Numerous Allo and Innomaker users will have a huge advantage of what I consider my contribution. On top of that all the Volumios, Moode, pCP and other RPI OSes will take huge advantage of that work. And they all make quite some money with all that. I won't see any "thank you SC" from these folks.

I involved myself (supporting role) in getting the LMS improved on the large buffer handling and Material Skin and a lot more stuff which goes under the radar. 

All I am saying - I am still doing a lot of free of charge community work.  

Now. Back to pCP and sKit.

I am not using pCP. Never really did. It'd require quite some motivation to spent a couple
of weeks evolving a software package I am not even using myself. Not to forget. I'd be pushing 
the pCP folks and their project - without any gain/support on my side. 

You wouldn't believe how much effort (money and working hours) it takes to go public with a project 
and to keep a project alive that's gone public. Development and support environment (HW/SW) , 
development, which includes finding and developing system improvements, coding and testing it, documentation, support - this all adds seriously up. What you see on the surface is the tip of an iceberg.
You get the tip - I got to take care on the huge part below the surface.

To be honest, without reasonable community funding I simply can't do more than I already do - and that's already much too much. From the mails I receive I understand there are a number of folks that would be more than happy to get the latest greatest SW solution. That shows me that there are some people out there still enjoying my stuff. But again. There's no motivation to evolve the project at this stage. 

I know, you'll understand. 

Just to wrap it up.  One thing I can say. All the tuning measures are still worth it. No matter how well a DAC or streamer measures, you'd most probably still experience a nice improvement with a proper set of tuning measures in place. That's at least my experience - YMMV. And that's the main reason why I still work on my own projects.

Take care.


1 comment:

  1. Hello Klaus, this is fair, working for nothing is OK only for a certain period of time, i think we can all get this for sure.
    As you said, we are many reading with great attention and following your work with passion, and i will talk to myself, after having tried many of the OS systems here (roon, audirvana, daphile, moode, volumio, Max2Play, foobar, picoreplayer, and other ones that don't come to my mind now), i'm once again back to LMS/Material Skin?pCP and all your recommendations and tweaks.
    Without going in the absurd pricing mode of roon (to my own & personal point of view) i'm more than happy to pay for having something great and supporting your work.
    You mentioned many time that you have your own system which is not pCP, is there a world where you could build an .ISO and sell it? I suppose that your followers are kind and wise enough to pay of even maybe subscribe for such service, at least i would be interested.
    Maybe launching a survey to see if it's worth it, how many people would go this way, What price people is willing to pay for this, ...
    This could be better for you instead of just a "buy me a coffee" type of thing.
    That was just my two cents on this, and to tell you once again that you and your work on this topic ROCK !!!

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