French company Audirvāna creates software for playing music files and from streaming services Qobuz, Tidal and HighResAudio. The latter service is a German music shop with a streaming service.
Audirvāna is installed on a Mac or Windows machine, and nice apps for the phone or tablet are available to control the software from the couch. Audirvāna streams using UPnP, Chromecast or an USB connection between the computer and the DAC or streamer. We are enamoured by Audirvāna’s sound quality, see our review.
The company has been making headway with their ‘Plays with Audirvāna’ certification programme, which is joined by more and more manufacturers. Now they are taking the next step and have announced a Linux version of their software.
Unlike the Windows and Mac version, this Linux version is without an interface. The software is operated through a new version of the app for phone or tablet. Besides Linux, the software can also be installed on a QNAP NAS. This step opens the door to using Audirvāna on Raspberry Pi-based streamers, like Volumio and the open source software Ropieee XL also offer. Ropieee XL is widely used to make a Roon endpoint of a streamer.
We expect to see Audirvāna Linux added as a choice in due course, currently the software is still in beta testing. Great fun for computer audio enthusiasts, you can test the software by navigating to Audirvāna’s Linux forum.