How to use the Raspberry Pi 3/4 SD card image

Updater

If you already have a working image, you can update it to MicroMPX 4.2.6 / Stereo Tool / STudio / STAMP / PiMP 10.41 with this updater file.

How to use the Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 SD card image

Our Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 SD card image makes it very easy to use the following programs on a Raspberry Pi with any HifiBerry sound card:

MicroMPX Encoder
MicroMPX Decoder
Stereo Tool
PiMP - Pi Microphone Processor, with latencies down to 2.8 ms
STudio - Studio monitoring processor, with latencies down to 4.5 ms
STAMP - Stereo Tool AM Processor
MicroMPX AM Reprocessor, to reuse an existing MicroMPX stream to generate a reasonable quality AM signal

To use this, all you need to do is write the image to an SD card. Once that's done, you can select programs to run, select your exact HifiBerry device and update the software via the built-in web interface.

What you need

A Raspberry Pi 3, 4 or 5
A good power supply for the Raspberry Pi. Use the official Raspberry power supply if you can, others often don't deliver enough power (3 A), which impacts the speed.
A HifiBerry sound card (it may work with USB sound cards as well)
An SD card that may be overwritten, bigger than 4 GB
A network cable
A computer with an SD card writer

Step 1: The PI

Put the HifiBerry card on the Pi, and fasten the screws. If you have an enclosure, put it in the enclosure.

Connect the Pi to your network with the network cable. Wifi is not configured on the image.

Don't plug in the power yet - you need the SD card image first.

Step 2: The SD card

Download the SD card image for Raspberry Pi 3/4 (older, very thoroughly tested, does not support Pi 5) or the SD card image for Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 (new as of October 10th 2024) and unzip it.

Next, use a program such as Win32DiskWriter to write the .img file to the SD card:

Put the SD card in the card writer of your pc
Select the unzipped .img file
Make sure that the correct drive is selected! Any data on the selected device will be lost!
Press Write. This will take a few minutes.

Step 3: Booting!

First, put the SD card in the Raspberry Pi. Then connect the power supply.

On the first boot, some preparation steps are done, to make the SD card ready for use. After that, it will reboot and start the MicroMPX Decoder. This takes about 1-2 minutes.

Once the device has started, the MicroMPX Decoder is runing, and the web interface is running on port 8080. The IP address is assigned by the network (via DHCP). So, if you know the IP address, you can connect to http://ip:8080/ from any web browser on your network.

What if I don't know the IP address?

There are several ways to find the network address:

The easiest way: If you connect a monitor to the Pi, it will display the IP address directly below the Thimeo logo. (This only works if it has been able to get an IP address fast enough though).
You can log in to your router, and see which IP address it assigned to the Pi
You can check what your own IP address is, and try nearby values. Say yours is 192.168.0.100, then try 192.168.0.101, 192.168.0.102 etc. We're talking about your IP address on your local network here, which you can find with ipconfig on Windows or ifconfig on Linux.

Step 4: Sound card and program selection

If you want to run a MicroMPX decoder, and you have a HifiBerry DAC+ sound card, everything should be working at this point. But if you want to run a different program, or if you have a different HifiBerry sound card, you can go to System Info, and select your sound card and software to run.