Crown CTD-8125 & iTunes clone for Linux (Sustain)
It's the little things.
May 2026, I received a CTD-8125 to replace my Mini DSP 10x10 HD and the two CT8150, in parallel, I wrote a iTunes inspired Linux music player (Sustain).
Two fairly small things, but huge quality of life improvement.
Crown CTD-8125
This one allows me :
- to remove the MiniDSP and feed-in straight in Dante.
- have mixed signals (ie. I can use two dante sources for a single pair of speakers)
- tweaks the DSP for a webGUI instead of having to keep a dedicated Win10 laptop.
- have auto-standby (2W), where I used to use two zigbee switches chained (first turn off amps, then DSP, and reverse to power on)
One blindspot, the CTD 8125 manual said that the amps drew 2W with network, I assumed that the network would always be up, it's not. In 2W sleep mode, it turns of networking. So I had to keep an analog Dante output to feed one of the amp analog inputs. The input is muted, but that's enough to wake up the amplifier. It takes about 15sec.
I'm very happy with this setup. Not having to worry about wake/sleep is great. The dynamic power distribution allows the Focal Sopra 3 to tap into the full 2x500W, of have the Baltic draw about 50W while giving 450W to the JBL subs. It's an awesome feature.
Sustain (iTunes clone for Linux)
Clone is a little bit abusive. When I switched to Linux from MacOS, I really missed iTunes. Before switching I had scouted alternatives and by 2017 I crossed the bridge. But the audio player world on Linux was and is still terrible. I settled on Rhythmbox + Picard as the "least objectionable" choice.
Excess quota on Codex+GPT5.5 and Claude Code + Opus 4.7 allowed me to roll my own "fork" or "port" of iTunes. It's heavily inspired by the 2005-2015 golden era.
I'm picking and choosing what I find to have been tasteful decisions, adding my own dream features. I cannot state how much I feel "at home" with this player.
When your life revolves so much around music, and when you have discovered iTunes during your teenage years, I think you form some kind of a bond.
This work got me to look at recent versions of iTunes (Apple Music now) and MacOS. I must say, I could not walk back to Apple today. I had strong disagreements with the path Apple was taking at the time. UI/UX was not one of them, but it has become one.
If you are interested, here is Sustain on Github. It's written un Rust and uses GTK4. It's released under GPL3 and packages for Debian/Ubuntu (amd64/arm64) + a Flatpack alternative.