I’ve been using a combination of Musicbee, Bubble Upnp and Serviio, to sort of give me the Roon experience on the cheap.
In the end after slumming it for 7 months, I’ve come back to Roon.
The main reason is because, for all its foibles and relatively high outlay, Roon still does local networking the best. Frankly I’m just fed up with intermittent upnp connection to local devices like chromecast and DAPs.
Musicbee’s been fine and that’s where the compromise comes in. Since Roon does not have a mobile solution I’m stuck with tagging and bagging my Flacs to make them portable friendly, so I’ve decided to still use Musicbee as my interface to the outside world so to speak.
Anyhow… it’s nice to be back. And really nice to benefit once more from the effortless networking Roon offers
Welcome back. Mobile is definitely being worked on Enno has said as much in a recent interview. Just no commitment to when other than when it’s ready and to the standard they are setting themselves.
For on the go Plexamp beats the rest of the stuff out there right not now. Its not perfect but does a better job than bubbleupnp and it’s interface is getting better. Its rubbish for home hifi though.
I might revisit that. I tried Plex a year or 2 back, but the linking up of devices was choppy.
My go-to solution for a long while after that was to use an unlimited Dropbox account, with all my music (around 10tb) online and then us Cloudplayer to stream from there. Worked well enough, but expensive.
Every year or so I look around to see if there are any new developments with this stuff. A few days ago I got bored and spent almost all day trying various combinations of serviio, lm server, bubbleupnp, etc. to try to get even close to what roon does for multi-room playback of a combined local/qobuz library.
It was shocking, really, how good roon is and how bad the alternatives are.
I already have JRiver, and it would be fine for local library playback except for the outdated UI and the fact it appears to be a dead-end product that will never integrate streaming. I keep it around to load playlists to phone, and that’s it.
Media Monkey is a distant second to JRiver for local library playback/management, but at least it looks a little nicer.
I tried Audirvana a couple of times, but still not even close, plus a lot of drama just trying to install it on Windows. I tried music bee a while back, but got a blue screen of death when I tried to play a 24/96 flac so I promptly uninstalled it. I’ve played around with foobar, but life’s too short for all the tinkering required plus it seems like a cult.
Plex? Seriously? Kodi? Lol.
So roon it is for me and I won’t be wasting any more time trying others until something miraculously better comes along that is cheaper and universally acclaimed.
I run Roon with RPi / Allo Digione (to a Audiolab M-DAC) and a Cambridge Audio CXN V1 (ie not Roon Ready) so Roon ->CXN is AirPlay at best unless I go for a bridge of some sort.
I still use JRiver for my video & soundbar etc which needs DLNA.
What I did find was MConnect to act as the controller which gives access to Tidal & Qobuz, in other words you can direct those streams to any DLNA renderer and hence directly into your HiFi system. It’s not Roon but its better than JRemote and JRiver GUI and gives you all the customization of views that JRiver gives.
Unfortunately JRiver will never do streaming !! JimH is stuck on this and has made his view abundantly clear , not sure why I think he had some bad experiences in the past, so they will wither and die sometime in the future.
I also tried Audirvana and TBH it is so unstable as to be unusable to me , I couldn’t get the Remote App to keep a connection consistently and there is NO customization so for a big library its poor
Hence Roon , warts and all , still wins hands down
That’s great. I think the BDP-1 is a marvelous Roon endpoint. IMO it works best with AES/EBU or BNC. The USB was iffy for me on the BDP-1. It’s when you start needing database memory for the MPD functions, it shows its limitations. Are you using it strictly for Roon, or have you tried it with MPD or DLNA? That Juli card does a good job.
