Any intention to ever offer Amazon/Alexa control of ROCK (non-Nucleus)?
I’m sure you’ve seen your user community calling for this.
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Danny,
Can you share how you were able to communicate from AWS to the Roon? I have to run a fake cloud service (on Heroku) right now for my Echo to control my Roon.
we ran a service in AWS and then used Roon’s push mechanism to send down data to Roon. Before we had push, we tested by just maintaining an open connection. The push stuff was built to scale.
yes, but we are still waiting for the Alex story to get better… our tests showed that external speakers greatly impacted Alexa’s ability to hear properly. the product was very frustrating to use.
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Any way to enable Amazon Echo as a Roon output, in the same way an Echo can play music from Spotify etc.? I.e. set Roon as a default music source? That should enable Alexa to better understand words spoken during playback? Not ideal for that top quality playback via a dedicated system but a good first step and fine for casual multi-room listening, perhaps via the phono socket or Bluetooth?
I’ve had that problem as well. I solve it rather easily by using an Echo that’s away from the speakers (in my case, one I have in the kitchen). Works > 90% of the time.
Right now I control Pandora radio this way. Would be so nice to be able to control Roon as well. Now, I have to make sure to have a device nearby, and hope for the best that device will see my Roon Core (which is probably about 85% of the time for the first go). So Alexa at 90% beats my current user experience…
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Danny, thank you for sharing that info!
In general, I don’t have too much trouble with the Echo and feedback issues from my speakers because my Echo is a bit isolated from the room where my speakers are playing. I have a feature in my Alexa app that will mute, or lower the volume if you start a multi-turn conversation with my Roon app. Volume is restored at the end of the Echo session. I do have a bunch of basic command Skills, which don’t get to utilize that muting functionality. Always having to use ‘No Intent’ skills can often be tedious IMHO. Usually, the app is nice for starting the music when the family is prepping for dinner and everyone’s hands are full.
When I originally started the project about this time last year I was optimistic that I could construct an Echo controller. I used to run the Muzak project for Logitech Media Server which was a good starting point for my Roon version. I ended up just using Muzak as a reference and wrote my own app from scratch, not to mention I had to ramp up on the whole Alexa Skills Kit API. While the App does work, it’s definitely a Pareto solution.
I wrote a much more elegant solution using multi-turn conversation, which is decent but likely could use a lot of optimization when matching the Slots data such as ‘Composer’, ‘Album’, or ‘Song Title’ with the library data from the Roon. For instance, when my wife wants to listen to “Miike Snow” or my daughter wants to listen to “deadmau5” the fuzzy logic matching is pretty poor. I’ve recently cheated a bit by hacking in some custom mappings to solve common family search fails. 
The biggest challenge is that it’s not easy for users to install a Roon extension unless they pretty technically savvy. 
The best turn-key solution seems to be authoring a platform-specific installer which installs a NodeJS application. I did not invest any time into this problem, but I considered it for business costs. Please let me know if I am mistaken.
The last challenge was getting the AWS to communicate with my Roon server/extension, which I was named RoonHub. (At the time I wondered if I would get a ‘cease and desist letter’ from you guys if I followed through with the idea) 
. I started with ZeroMQ but that didn’t play nicely with my firewall, so I ended up using SocketCluster. It seemed scalable, but if it wasn’t I figured I could hire someone that knew better then me. There is a lot of remaining work here, as I did not author the ability to create an account, link accounts with Amazon, etc.
In the end, I figured it would be a pretty hard business model to sustain, especially with no partnership. 
The product would be at the mercy of RoonLabs and Amazon API changes, not to mention if Roon made a native App. Amazon has continued to add additional functionality such as Card support, which is cool but adds to dev, maintenance, and support work. The installers would need to be revisited for every version of Windows and OSX. (I think I would just make Linux user use Docker.) 
I also figure that many potential users who are more tech-savvy would setup workarounds similar to Muzak. In general, I just didn’t have enough information about the Roon community size, server costs to justify pursuing the project and it wasn’t long before Roon mentioned creating their own client.
Thanks again for sharing a bit about how Roon implemented their system! I hope that your hard work will eventually see the light of day. 
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The hard cold facts that today having a mediocre speaker that you can talk to play or pause music is the future. Not integrating it will be a deterrent for a lot of people. I watched a couple generations of people being happy with mp3s and satellite radio! As it may not be a good idea to use one in the room where your main hi-fi speakers are but in other rooms, they will get listened to more as most people are completely happy with music in the background from any source at all.
I think Alexa integration should be framed in a way to accommodate the casual background needs of the majority of the people and have a disclaimer for the “Man Cave Hi-FI” room. ie: “Alexa may not be able to hear you if the walls are shaking”
Please pull this off the back burner and integrate it. Most people want convenience and Roon does this beautifully for the music and artist info but to not see the value in these Alexa type devices probably will limit sales.
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I think this analysis is probably correct (even though none if it has any appeal to me).
It eventually becomes a matter of business goals and target market: what does Roon Labs want be when they grow up?
This is for the Roon guys to decide.
But I want to repeat an observation I have made before: even conceding the parameters of this idea, “Pause” and “Play” and volume is weak.
I have a remote for audio system that implements those functions (the Meridian system talks back to Roon), but I never use it.
Because the interesting requests I have of Roon, the ones that Roon does better than anybody else, look like this:
Show me the albums by Vijay Iyer, sorted by Date Added.
Play “Break Things”.
Who is the bassist? (Answer Stephan Crump.)
What other music with Crump do I have?
What other music with Crump does Tidal have?
Select one or several or all, and play or shuffle them.
List artists similar to Iyer, Select one, look at albums, play one.
That is why I use the iPad remote to play music.
Voice control of that would be impressive.
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There are times when I sit in front of the speakers with an iPad or iPhone for which Alexa wouldn’t be necessary. But there are other times when I’ve friends home and want to find a song, or turn down/up the volume or go to the next one etc and my phone isn’t on me and I’m in the middle of a conversation and finding the phone or taking it out etc would be cumbersome - and being able to do all the things in the previous post would be impressive. Or my wife wants to use it when she’s cooking, exercising etc. Alexa would make life easier for so many scenarios where immersive listening isn’t involved and I think Roon needs to work in your life if you are subscribing and paying money to make it your main music interface and Alexa is something that many people have started using for this.
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As far as I am concerned, Alexa could know Roon as Oracle or Trinity or whatever name is easy to recognize.
+1 for Alexa basic voice control of Roon, please!
Thanks,
Goran
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The issue with Roon/Room is fixed by using RoonLabs as the wake up word. When using Big Sky with Alexa, you have to say, “Alexa ask Big Sky for the weather”. This could be the model for Roon. “Alexa, ask RoonLabs to play YES CONCERT PLAYLIST”.
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How did Alexa know I had a Yes concert Playlist? That’s it. I’m getting out my tin foil hat.
I’m seeing Yes featuring AWR this Sunday😀
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Enjoy the Show!. I made a Yes concert setlist playlist after seeing them last year
Thanks. I also made the list from last year’s shows. But I can see it’s more or less the same this year.
Just to add a +1 to this.
I am less interested in media control and much more interested in media search.
Media-control is a bit pointless when Alexa cant hear you due to large sound system - as it is I have got used to using a remote to mute when yelling at Alexa anyway - that is unless it can also have an option to auto-mute/dim whenever the alexa wake word is used for any command (not just those aimed at roon). I’m not sure if this is actually possible with the Alexa SDK. Maybe only reserved for highly integrated music skills (which this should be really).
What about a REST API to Roon, so that we can issue “play” or “search” commands against Roon? Those would be driven by another voice recognition app on the PC.
There is a REST API: https://github.com/RoonLabs/node-roon-api-browse
The problem is that it’s almost completely undocumented. What “opts” are available to /browse, for instance?
+1 to getting an Alexa app (controller and end point).
Im trialling Roon currently and this is unfortunately a deal breaker.
For my main system, using An app is ideal (too loud to talk over). For my study, I have a computer right there to control the music anyway. The other locations, Kitchen, bedroom and dinning room, I only require background music and use Echo devices here and the voice command to me is key; having all the extra metadata Roon provides in these locations is very low on my priority list. What I would like is access to all the flacs on my NAS, then to fail over to a streaming service (i have a poor internet connection hence preference for locally stored files), ability to play the same in all zones or move currently playing to a different zone. On rare occasions in these areas when I do want to know more information, getting out a mobile device isnt really an issue.
With no way to unify all 5 zones in my house under Roon, I dont think I can justify the cost. Shame as I do really like the interface and the way it works; the features it does have seem to work very well. Ill keep looking, and if this gap is filled officially or by open source before I find a different product, I’d happily buy Roon.
You can work it out from looking over various apps, particularly look at the example web app.
Basically everything is presented as drill down lists with a navigation stack. Actions are part of the hierarchy, for eg, you land on an album and the first entry in the resulting list will link to albums levels actions while the rest are the tracks. On each track, its kind of the same - drill down to get the available actions.
These actions are those you would see in the drop down menus in the normal UI - its a bit odd as an API at first glance, but straight forward enough to use. User profile list and selection etc can be found under the top level settings list as well - might be important if you want to make sure you get the correct users items if you have multiple profiles.
You will probably want to write some kind wrapper around it. You also have too remember that your place in the hierarchy appears to be stateful within a browse api instance (I think, I havnt tried multiple instances). It is basically a very simple view model of the app browse UIs.
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I am happy using heos with alexa and dlna for now…until roon supports alexa, it is a non-starter…plus hqplayer still sounds better…i also wonder if you can browse music by your folder structure yet…i think they promised that like 5 years ago…i keep hoping though…
i search google for “alexa roon” about every 6 months…someday maybe?