So now that I have origin running in my NAS, the only missing piece is being able to stream from it to my Mac. I’ve found a number of stream servers, but no players. Was hoping I could hook the Origin UI up to it, but no luck.
Anybody know of an endpoint I can stream to? I don’t want external hardware for this use case, just my Mac.
UPnP endpoint software for the Mac (a/k/a a UPnP “renderer”) is very much lacking. I think the UPnP/DLNA Alliance or some similar organization has an old one that works, but it has a fairly low resolution limitation, RedBook or 24/96 or something like that. At one time there was a HomeBrew install of upmpdcli for the Mac, but that’s been gone for a year or more IIRC.
You said you didn’t want external hardware, but in case you change your mind and know a bit of Linux, a Raspberry Pi with upmpdcli installed would be about the least expensive and smallest footprint solution I can think of.
Looked back at some correspondence I had at another site and found something a bit better, though I could only make it stream PCM, not DSD. So as long as you’re not upsampling, or only upsampling to PCM (or if your Linux-fu is better than mine - not hard - and you can configure this stuff to stream DSD), this would work:
You would want to install these two pieces of software from MacPorts: Rygel, and gstreamer1-gst-plugins-good. That should allow your NAS to see your Mac as a UPnP endpoint.
Thanks for the info! I hadn’t turned much up so far, so I’ll go down this rabbit hole.
Perhaps @Damien has a plan for making a mini renderer available to compliment the core player??
Sigh, don’t waste your time, unfortunately. Turns out the rygel port in MacPorts hasn’t been updated in literally years and will no longer run on Mac because although it hasn’t been updated, the dependencies it runs against have. 
So I’m now going to browse MacPorts to see whether there is a functional renderer for Mac in there somewhere. Not holding my breath.
Heh, might be some way to do it running Docker Desktop on Mac. Will check another day.
Dang. I also found a list of various UPNP renderers that have existed, but almost all of them seem to be dead now. Still digging to see what I can come up with.
Thanks for the nudge in the right direction. Hopefully we can come up with something.
Just install the Openhome Player, it works fine on my MacBook. Not much to it, but it is a renderer only. Control it from Audirvana remote. I haven’t tried it with an external DAC that supports DSD.
Just gave this a shot and it seems to do what I need it to. Was able to stream directly to my Mac, no issues.
I’d still like to see a a proper mini player of some sort, but this will do fine for now. Thanks for the recommendation!!
Doesn’t work with DSD, so if you don’t upsample or only upsample to PCM it should work.
Curious about what Docker Desktop might be able to do in terms of installing the appropriate software on the Mac.
I figured as much. I played some DSD and it works fine converting to PCM. Of course the MacBook doesn’t support DSD natively anyway (and I don’t normally use a DAC on my laptop). Agree that better software would be nice.
Just to clarify terminology for anyone unfamiliar, Mac does support DSD, but only in a format called DoP (DSD over PCM). Because of bits devoted to administrative tasks, this will result in a DSD rate on MacOS half that on a Windows or Linux machine. So for example if the input limit of your DAC is DSD512 on Windows and Linux, it will be DSD256 on Mac.
But please note this is only for direct USB connections where the MacOS Core Audio driver is used. UPnP is not subject to this Core Audio limitation, so if you are running Audirvana on your Mac and sending the signal to a UPnP endpoint the limitation will not apply.
Why do you bias it this way? There is no reason to inject a subjective and questionable bias regarding DSD sample-rate preference… It’s fair enough to show a subjective platform bias…
Simply put…
Windows and Linux handle raw DSD and DoP signals via both USB and Ethernet (There are no native DSD512 or DSD1024 recordings… these are derived from modulated PCM and lower-resolution DSD files)…
Apple macOS platforms separately handle up to DSD256 via USB using DoP 1.1 (DSD over PCM) protocol and handle raw DSD files up to DSD512 via Ethernet .
Core Audio API’s are always involved on macOS in regard to any audio signal throughput 
Well, mpd and upmpdcli do start and run on Docker Desktop on the Mac, but out of the box without edits to their configuration files mpd doesn’t find the connected DAC and upmpdcli doesn’t connect to mpd. (It won’t connect to mpd installed on the Mac via Homebrew either.)
By the time I’d figured out where the config files are (my first experience with Docker on Mac) and successfully edited the Homebrew configuration for mpd, I’d had enough for the day. Searching the Web to figure out how to edit config files is not my favorite activity. 
So that’s where we are with Docker - a big maybe at this point.