Time for another beta release.
And this one I’m rather excited about: the introduction of ‘convenience switching’!
One of the things that bothers me for a long time is the exclusive locking of an audio device. From a technical perspective its clear, but from a user perspective it can be rather annoying when you’re using multiple services.
This results in users sometimes not understanding why they can’t switch from HQPlayer to Roon (for example). Which often results in a reboot.
With the last release we introduced the audio status view, which gives you insight in which application has exclusive access to a particular audio device.
With this beta build you can now use multiple services and don’t need to care about this: just hit play on the particular service, and your RoPieee unit will take care of the rest: it will stop the current running service and hand over the access to the audio device!
Not all services provide the necessary hooks, but for now these services do: Roon, HQPlayer, Squeezelite, UPnP and Airplay. This means that with these services you can just switch between those, without the need to reboot or wait or anything. How cool is that? (I know, I’m pretty excited about it 
)
A few things: for both Roon and HQPlayer you need to take some action:
- With Roon you need to explictely give the RoPieee Remote Extension also access to the source controls. You can find this in the ‘Device Setup’, where a ‘External source control’ option shows up. There you can connect a certain RoPieee Remote Control. It looks like this:
- With HQPlayer you need to enable (once) the remote control access. A tiny, not so obvious button . It looks like this:
So, this needs extensive testing. And there are some ‘rough edges’ that I’m already on, but I wanted this out there so we can test test test.
With HQPlayer ‘hitting play’ isn’t enough: the first time this will take care of stopping the current running services, but it needs another hit on the play button to actually start it.
So go out and test and tell me what you think!
Regards Harry
