- Every computer now can be an audiophile music player
Even your old, now desperately useless laptop. Volumio x86 is the product of our effort to produce the very same system, but for different devices and architecture. This has been achieved trough the development of our integrated build system. So, what you get is the incredible set of features, but on a more powerful device than the Raspberry PI or other single board computers.
Volumio X86 has however a great addition over its ARM counterparts: kiosk mode (thanks Gé!!). Basically, you will see Volumio’s UI in all its splendor on your monitor, if you have a laptop, or on an external display if you attach it via HDMI for example. And the result is just brilliant.
Speaking of Audio quality, we applied the same optimizations that you learned to love on Raspberry Pi. And such solution might be of interest especially for those with async USB DACs, which are still marginally affected by PI’s USB bus packets dropouts (the glitches you hear with hi-res files). I won’t enter into too much audio quality speculations, since I don’t have any data or measurements to prove or dismiss any difference. Sure, the most notably difference is the speed and reactiveness of the system.
I’m successfully using Volumio X86 on a very basic NUC5i3RYK
I also triend on my main machine, a Dell XPS 15 
However, from now on, Volumio x86 will be available as an official supported platform, and will be on direct development by the team, together with Raspberry PI and Odroid. As usual, you can download it in the download section.
Also, for those wanting to get a valid x86 system, the good news is that we’re working on a big surprise that will head to our Shop in the beginning of september .
Let us know what you think!
… fun fact behind the curtains
Without being announced, Volumio x86 totalled in the first 3 days of the new website uptime, a grand total of 68k downloads. We then realized what a mess we did and decided to push hard to release asap…