A Raspberry Pi 4 with a 16GB or larger microSD card, an ES9038Q2M I2S DAC HAT, a 5V 3A USB-C supply, and headphones or an amplifier.

The DAC board I used is sold as the InnoMaker HiFi DAC PRO and silkscreened SkyLark DAC. Same hardware, two names, so search either.

Read this before going further: the control daemon has no authentication. Anyone who can reach port 8080 can upload files, delete files, and shut the machine down. That is fine on a home network you control, and unsafe exposed to the internet. Do not port forward it.

Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit, written with Raspberry Pi Imager.

Before writing, open the settings gear and set a hostname, your username and password, and enable SSH. Add Wi-Fi credentials if you are not using Ethernet. This device never needs a monitor or keyboard, so set all of it here.

With the Pi powered off, seat the DAC onto the full 40-pin header. Power up, wait about 30 seconds, then connect over SSH.

Set a DHCP reservation for the Pi in your router while you are at it. Otherwise the address moves and you spend an evening hunting it, as I did.

In /boot/firmware/config.txt, set dtparam=audio=off, add ,noaudio to the existing dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d line, and add dtoverlay=i-sabre-q2m at the end.

The noaudio matters more than it looks. Without it the HDMI audio devices and the DAC race at boot, the card numbering changes between reboots, and audio breaks at the worst possible moment.

After a reboot, aplay -l should list exactly one card, named DAC.

The i-sabre-q2m driver claims S16_LE support, but in 16 bit mode the I2S bit slots misalign on the ES9038Q2M, which wants 32 bit frames. You get recognisable music buried in harsh noise, with no buffer underruns to explain it.

Create ~/.asoundrc with a plug device that converts to S32_LE before the hardware. The exact config is in the repository README.

To hear it for yourself, run speaker-test against plughw:DAC,0 and then against the plug device. The first is noise, the second is a clean tone.

Install mpd and mpc, then in /etc/mpd.conf set your music directory and user, and configure the ALSA output to address the card by name as hw:DAC,0 rather than by index.

Set auto_resample, auto_format and auto_channels to no. Those three lines are what make playback bit perfect, and without them ALSA quietly converts everything.

Hand over MPD's state directory with chown, enable the service, then copy some music across and confirm it plays.

Clone the repository into ~/artifact, create a virtual environment, install the requirements, and run it. Full commands are in the repository README.

Open http://your-pi-address:8080 from any browser on the network.

Create a systemd unit for artifactd, enable it, and the Pi boots straight into being a music player with no terminal needed afterwards.

A single sudoers line lets the power button in the interface actually halt the machine. It also means anyone who can reach port 8080 can shut your Pi down, so add it only if that is acceptable on your network.

The reel spins while a track plays. Drag it to scrub, hold it to pause under your hand. Centre pad plays and pauses, long press stops. Up and down move through the queue, left and right change screens. Triggers on the right edge are fast forward and rewind. The knob on the top edge is volume, one detent per step. The M button switches between tape and vinyl.

Drag audio files onto the device from a desktop browser to upload, or use the add music row in the system screen from a phone.