Access to metadata

Audio Gear Talk RoPieee
1

I’m using RoPieee with a variety of sources; Roon, Airplay and PlexAmp primarily. I’d like to add a little screen to my streamer showing the currently playing track and include play/pause/skip commands also.

Of couse, RoPieee doesn’t offer this out of the box. I am willing to get my hands dirty, but I’m wondering how feasible this is. Has anyone accomplished something like this?

One approach I am considering:

  • install RoPieee on the pi as a VM using ProxMox
  • additionally add another VM which will be my own application
  • in my own application, monitor what source is currently playing
  • For Roon, I can use the Roon API to fetch what’s playing
  • For Plexamp, I can access the local PlexAmp Headless API to fetch what’s playing
  • For Airplay, I am stuck unless @spockfish is willing to enable MQTT publishing of metadata
  • Given all that metadata, I can create a websocket that will pick the active source and publish metadata
  • And I can send commands over the websocket which will be translated to commands for the active source
  • And finally a small client application showing a UI and connecting to the websocket for updates and to send commands

I am really hoping I can avoid manually doing what RoPieee does for me, cause it’s such a great piece of kit. Rock solid. Being able to compose my ‘UI’ layer on top of it would be so nice.

Anyone who has tried similar things, I’d love to hear your experiences! Especially around Airplay, 'cos I’m stuck there with getting metadata!

Thanks!
Bastiaan

PS
I realise RoPieee offers way more sources than the three I mentioned – I don’t use those so I’ve skipped over them.

2

Have you looked at:

3

Er, yes it does… RoPieee | Display

If you mean that you want to use the screen with Plexamp and Airplay, then you’re probably better looking at a Linux distribution, e.g. DietPi that you can build stuff on top of…

1 Like
4

Yeah so this is just for Roon, using vanilla RoPieee. I’m wanting a screen that will display what’s playing across all three services I use.

Also, I don’t want a 7" screen. I am looking for a much smaller high-res screen as this is for desktop use primarily.

5

Yes that’s what I mean. I don’t only use Roon. It would be silly to have a screen that is blank half of the time, IMHO.

6

I haven’t tested this, but I doubt that ropieee’s driver support will cope with running inside a VM (even if it’s running on an ARM processor). I suspect it’ll just fail to boot.

7

IIRC Harry has been looking at options to display Plexamp (and possibly other sources), but obviously this would be a big change and I have no idea if there’s any ETA.

8

I spent some time going down this rabbit hole, and my initial conclusion is that doing what Ropieee does is pretty damn hard if you want reliable switching between sources. Hats off to Spockfish :slight_smile:

So then my fallback option is to run a system next to Ropieee and use whatever means possible to fetch what is currently playing. I think for Roon and Plexamp this will be doable, but Airplay will be hard without changes to Ropieee itself.