About SROVA.

A life around sound

SROVA was created by Sasha Masand, whose professional life has revolved around sound and media for more than three decades.

After studying at Xavier Institute of Communications in Mumbai, his career moved through advertising, television broadcasting, production and voice-over work, including Zee TV, STAR TV Asia in Hong Kong and, later, Indian Voice-Overs, which he founded in 2006.

Working with voices, performers and creative professionals for so many years also shaped an important principle behind SROVA:

Creative work has value.

Artists should be compensated for their music. The services that bring that music to listeners have value too. SROVA was never conceived as a way around that ecosystem. Its purpose is to give legitimate subscribers and music owners another high-quality way to enjoy the music they already have access to.

From listener to Linux

Away from work, music listening had always been a constant.

Like many audiophiles, the journey went through different players, servers, DACs and software systems. Roon, Logitech Media Server and other approaches all played their part, but eventually the attraction of Linux became difficult to ignore.

Linux offered something particularly appealing for a dedicated music player: a lightweight system that could be understood, controlled and stripped back to what was actually needed.

And then there was the Raspberry Pi.

Small, inexpensive, silent and remarkably capable, the Raspberry Pi made it possible to experiment with dedicated audio systems without turning every idea into a major hardware project. A Pi, a USB DAC and Linux could become a complete music player sitting quietly beside an audio system.

That was very close to the ideal.

The computer should not be the centre of the listening experience.

A desk is a perfectly good place to work. It is not necessarily where you want to spend an evening listening to an album or playlist.

The player should sit beside the audio system, without needing its own monitor or keyboard, and be controlled from wherever the listener happens to be.

Headless by design.

From experimentation to SROVA

That search eventually led to the open-source hiresTI project and bit-perfect TIDAL playback on Linux.

What began as curiosity became experimentation. Experimentation became modification. Raspberry Pis were joined by Intel NUCs and other Linux machines. Different DACs were tested. Playback behaviour, device handling, networking, remote control and the user interface all became areas to improve.

At some point it stopped feeling like a modified player and started becoming its own system.

That system became SROVA.

The Raspberry Pi remains an important part of that story. SROVA is designed to run on modest Linux hardware as comfortably as it does on more powerful machines. A Pi can sit beside a DAC and amplifier doing exactly what a dedicated music component should do: play music and otherwise stay out of the way.

Linux is just as fundamental.

SROVA does not treat Linux as an afterthought or a platform that happens to be supported. It was built there, developed there and designed around the strengths of Linux from the beginning.

Music should look beautiful too

There was another part of the listening experience that SROVA eventually had to address.

The Now Playing screen.

Too many otherwise excellent music players seem to treat it as an afterthought. Album artwork, typography and information are squeezed into something that can feel less like part of a listening room and more like the back of a milk carton.

Good music deserves better.

That idea became SROVA Cast — a dedicated display companion designed to put the album artwork and the music back at the centre of the room.

And at the heart of it is one of the smallest computers in the Raspberry Pi family: the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

The little guy with big-screen ambitions.

A Pi Zero 2 W can sit quietly behind a display, receive what is playing from SROVA and turn an otherwise ordinary screen into a dedicated Now Playing display. No desktop computer. No keyboard. No unnecessary complexity.

Just the album cover, the music information and the visual atmosphere that belongs with it.

Because bit-perfect playback matters.

But good music should look beautiful too.

More than a player

SROVA has gradually grown into a small suite of applications built around the same listening experience.

At its centre is the SROVA Player: the headless Linux music system itself.

The SROVA Android Remote puts control in your hand without requiring you to sit in front of a computer.

SROVA Cast gives the music a visual home in the listening room.

Together they are different parts of the same idea: the technology should serve the music without becoming the focus of the room.

One player. Your music.

SROVA brings together streaming services, locally owned music, NAS libraries and Internet Radio while keeping the listening experience centred around one player and one audio system.

TIDAL, Qobuz, Spotify Connect, Local Music and Internet Radio can all live within the same environment.

But adding more services was never the objective by itself.

The objective was always simpler:

Sit down. Choose some music. Listen.

The technology should disappear as quickly as possible.

Why free?

B-ME — Beyond Money Endeavour — is probably the simplest explanation for why SROVA exists.

There comes a point in life when every project does not have to become a business.

Some projects can be undertaken because they are interesting.

Because they are difficult.

Because somebody might enjoy using the result.

Because the process of making something better is rewarding in itself.

SROVA is one of those projects.

There is another, more practical reason too.

A listener may already be paying every month for a music service and for the music itself. Asking that same listener to pay again simply for software that brings that service to their audio system never felt essential to what SROVA was trying to achieve.

SROVA therefore remains free of charge.

Keeping it that way also means its development does not have to be driven by subscriptions, conversion rates, feature tiers or investors.

Decisions can instead begin with a different question:

Does this make SROVA a better music player?

If the answer is yes, it is worth exploring.

Open source, with respect for where it came from

SROVA would not exist without open-source software.

Its origins include the hiresTI project, and parts of SROVA's development have benefited from studying and adapting the work of other open-source developers. Those origins and contributions are preserved and credited within the project.

SROVA remains open source because sharing that work is part of the same cycle that allowed SROVA to exist in the first place.

At the same time, streaming services operate within their own technical and commercial ecosystems. As SROVA develops, the intention is to work constructively with those providers and follow the mechanisms they require for authentication, playback accounting, artist compensation and legitimate access.

Open source and respect for the music industry do not have to be opposing ideas.

Built for listeners

SROVA is not intended to reinvent music.

It does not make the DAC sound better through magic, turn one recording into another, or add processing simply so another feature can appear on a list.

Its job is to get out of the way.

Put the player beside the audio system. Pick up a phone, tablet or laptop. Choose the music. Then put the device down.

If you want a screen in the room, let SROVA Cast make it part of the experience rather than part of the computer.

The screen is optional.
The music isn't.