The Raspberry Pi has an on-board audio jack, which is super handy for all kinds of sound effects and speech, just plug and go! However, for when you want better audio for music playback, a USB audio card can greatly improve the sound quality and volume, this tutorial will show you how.

This guide will also show you how to record audio via the headphone jack on the adapter

Pre-requisites

First up, you will need a fully set up Raspberry Pi that is otherwise working and you can log into. We have tons of tutorials on that front, so get your SD card loaded with Raspbian (that's what we're using in this tutorial), and either ssh in, log in with a monitor and keyboard, or a USB console cable
Just a reminder, this tutorial is only known good for the USB audio card in the Adafruit shop. Audio cards all use different chipsets so if you have another card, it may not work here! You'll have to figure out what's different for your model.

This guide was first published on Sep 17, 2013. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Instructions) was last updated on Sep 14, 2013.

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