Wolfson Pi Audio Card for Raspberry Pi

Sounds great. Not easy to setup if you aren't willing to really dig in.Only disappointment is no optical out, and the stereo I bought right after this does not have coax spdif in, but that's not the wolfsons fault. Just a fact..

Even though it seems to be touted for use with the RPI, when I bought mine in June 2014, there were not drivers for it.

Product works well (sound quality quite nice) but drivers aren't in the mainline kernel so using this freezes your kernel and system versions. Expansion headers have no documentation and support. You will not have access to your I2C expansion ports. You might get access to your UART port via the J8 expansion header but don't count on it.

They promised to get the drivers included in the raspbian build months ago. There has been little visible effort or support on this front. This card is not useful if I have to use their custom build for everything. I would stay away until they prove themselves.

This card is easy to mount and has great sounding audio. It does require a bit of setup since it uses a custom kernel. Wolfson and element14 do supply their own image, but I didn't want to lose my entire setup. (Also, element14's download speeds were horrible for a 4.4GB file).There is a helpful document at ( [...] ) which discusses how to compile your own kernel. NOTE: The last command in step 8 should read "git am -3 /home/pi/rpi_wlf_3.10_beta/*.patch". The make command in step 9 took six hours for me (No O.C.).When changing the Input/Output source with Wolfson's "use cases", I need to sudo them everytime and then I must run any program using sound as root. I'm not sure if this is also the case with Wolfson's image.Overall it took me about a day to setup and get working, but I'm very pleased with the results.

A good sound card, but the driver choices are very limited. Basically the only way to make this work is to use the special spin that Wolfson has created. If that spin won't work for you, then you are out of luck. If the drivers were usable on all spins, then this would get five stars.I use this on a Raspberry Pi model B running mpd (music player daemon). It plays music tracks in wav format - FLAC (96 khz/24 bit) and various Vorbis (OGG) formats. The high bit-rate FLAC files stuttered a bit until I configured mpd and ALSA to NOT resample.