I would like to use this thread once in a while to share what my plans are with the received donations (as I’m not planning to use it all just for coffee). So here is my first report.
The Background
A favorite topic within this Roon Community is to share what we are playing. The popularity of the “What We Are Listening To” thread is that big that we now have monthly renewals to keep it within acceptable limits. But I have to admit that I do not participate in it myself, probably because:
- I’m in the dinosaur camp, no subscription on Qobuz or Tidal
- I’m too lazy to type over artist and title names to play a track on YouTube
So some time back I stumbled on two online services that allow you to share links to the different streaming services with others, these services are Songlink/Odesli and Songwhip. It made me wonder if it would be possible to use the Roon API to get the Now Playing information and convert that into a shareable link using the mentioned services.
Quite some research followed, but now I can report that I created an extension that does just that, getting the Now Playing information from the Roon API and converting it into a shareable link.
But there is one catch (or maybe more, we have to find out)
During the research I found out that for this to work I need a back-end in the cloud that accesses the different third party services, reason is that such services use application specific tokens that cannot be distributed as part of an extension.
Now the thing is that resources in the cloud come at a price, and, to get to the core of this post, this is where the donations come into play.
Another unknown in this story is the possible user base of the extension and how much traffic they will generate, also these third party services have rate limits that might be hit. For this reason I want to ramp up slowly and therefor decided that at first only those who donated on Buy Me a Coffee can use the extension. This might change at a later time.
Sharoon
I named the extension Sharoon and it can be found in the new Social category within the Extension Manager. If you provide the email address, used on Buy Me a Coffee, in the extension then you receive an email with an activation link. The help text in the extension should lead you through the process.
The email address is only used for verification against the BMC administration not for any other purposes.
To finish off, here is a short video that demonstrates Sharoon:
