Welcome to Randy!
Randy is a minimalist music streamer and player for raspberry pi, linux and macos.
Randy can play web radio, podcasts, many kinds of music streaming sites such as soundcloud, mixcloud and pretty much all music file types.
Randy has a really efficient randomiser algorithm which makes sure that there is always something next in your playlist.
With Randy my main objective was to stay minimal, natural to use and with some cool delights. Sound quality is most important, I build my own amplifiers and speakers with the basic philosophy of as little things in the signal path as possible and Randy follows this philosophy as well. So far Randy sounds great with my system and has been my workhorse player for the past few years.
I am currently building Randy with RPI, SBC and thin clients in mind and maybe as an desktop app later for linux and macos if there is demand.
This will probably be the first non-MPD RPI streamer and very minimalistic at this stage. Instead of MPD I am using MPV which is a beast of a video player, but has all the good stuff to put out amazing sound quality as well. On top of that, it has a very efficient IPC connection and a direct pipe to yt-dlp which makes it easy to play just about anything off the web or your filesystems.
If anyone is interested to collaborate or contribute let me know. This is a fun project with lots of possible enhancements :)
On Raspberry PI or Other Linux devices
Install Ubuntu Server 32bit or Raspberry Pi OS lite on your device.
SSH into the new OS installation and type in the following commands to download and run the install script.
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PapaSimons/Randy/master/install.sh -o install.sh
sudo chmod +x ./install.sh
sudo ./install.sh- in Ubuntu server you can ignore the many blue services prompt and press enter -
At the end of the installation you will have to reboot.
If everything goes well, you can go to a computer or mobile browser on a device thats connected to the same wifi as Randy and type: http://randy/ into the search bar and it will load Randy.
Note on host name - After the installation the hostname will be 'randy'.
Note on OSes and Devices - Randy has worked on RPI, Orange pi Zero, Intel NUC, HP T-520 Thin client and maybe others as well.
Note on DACs - Randy installation is currently set to a USB DAC, if you have an i2s HAT DAC or something else you can follow the manufacturer instructions to set it up on raspberry pi OS, or the one in the wiki page, and here is a great tutorial for alloboss
On Macos
Coming soon!
Randy has an experimental update script which you can run if you already have Randy installed and want to get the latest changes. The update script loads the new project files and maintains the playlist and stickies you already have.
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PapaSimons/Randy/master/update.sh -o update.sh
sudo chmod +x ./update.sh
sudo ./update.shIf you like Randy you can support the project here! 🫰