Bug in C4 Roon Nucleus Driver?

[Vincent_Kennedy]

@support @noris @brian

This issue was reported here on this thread on 12/2020. Surely those of us that purchased Nucleus and Nucleus Plus should get a little attention. I specifically purchased a Nucleus Plus for the C4 integration.

Thoughts?

[Vincent_Kennedy]

@brian @enno - I did exactly as @danny suggested, only to find that after purchasing a Nucleus Plus, the integration is barely working.

Here’s my chat with @danny:

danny Danny DulaiRoon Labs: COO

Aug '19

I would pay extra (within reason) in a heartbeat to get the C4 driver without having to spring for the Nucleus. Sadly, I realize us C4 DIY’ers are probably too few and far between to make this feasible. I can hope though.

What is “within reason”? Everything in the C4/Crestron world seems “out-of-reason”

I would also pay extra for C4 integration to a Roon Rock.

Buy a Nucleus then. Consider that your “extra”.

[Vincent_Kennedy]

I spent four hours today at home with a Control4 technician. He himself was on the phone with Control4 for two of the four hours trying to make the integration work as expected. We learned a few things:

1. The Roon supplied Control4 Driver is not Control4 Certified.
2. The driver is locked so Control4 can’t open it up and see what’s going on.
3. Any Roon icon favorited to the Home screen will not function at all.

It seems that Team Roon, particularly @danny failed to mention that the driver isn’t Certified and Control4 can’t help when there’s an issue.

It doesn’t seem that there’s any passion for this with @brian @enno or @danny. It’s a shame really since we are directed to get a Nucleus if we want this integration.

Does anyone reading this have issues with the driver?

I hope this helps anyone else with these Control4 drivers. I had to spend $500 on a technician to learn that @danny promoted something to me that doesn’t work.

Also of note, it’s been thirty days since my last posting, and there’s been no reply from Roon management.

[Darius_Lakdawalla]

@Vincent_Kennedy : Yes, I continue to have unresolved problems with the driver, and I believe others do too. Of note, however, I no longer experience the problem with the favorited home screen Roon Icon. I am not sure how it got resolved, although my suspicion is that an update to the T4 touch screen solved it.

The (major) problems I continue to have are: (1) Roon consistently crashes my C4 touch screens when scrolling through long lists in Qobuz; (2) playing a zone from the Roon app does not get reflected in C4; (3) grouping and ungrouping zones in the Roon app does not cause them to become grouped or ungrouped in C4. I reported all these – along with about 5-6 other secondary issues – back in August 2020, but there has been no progress on resolving any of them, and I have heard no news since @noris acknowledged receipt of my issues list back then.

[Vincent_Kennedy]

Ouch. That’s a remarkably long list and a shameful resonse from support.

I have often wondered what the 1 - 3 year Roon roadmap looks like. But it’s clear to me that these issues aren’t top of mind. They have enticed us to purchase a product and it doesn’t work as advertised, there’s no communication, and no support.

I hope more people chime in.

[Zombeezy]

Well, I am on the fence about two major purchases, so this is disappointing to hear about this lack of love. Considering purchasing the Whirl Wind instead of the Nucleus Plus, and buying into the Control4 ecosystem. If it’s not perfect for audio integration with Roon, family is not going to use it.

[Darius_Lakdawalla]

Our family uses the Roon app instead of C4 to control Roon. In itself, I don’t view that as a problem, because the Roon app is more fun to use than the C4 interface.

However, the real problem is that the Roon Control4 driver does a fair to poor job of reflecting Roon app actions in C4 – e.g., C4 should reflect that Roon is playing, and the meta-data should be there too. In contrast, the Sonos driver for C4 is terrific at reflecting Sonos app actions in C4; the contrast between the polish of the Roon and Sonos C4 drivers is painfully stark.

I have programmed around some of the most egregious problems with the Roon driver – e.g., my programming switches the source to Roon when it detects Sonos playing an “unknown” track, which almost always implies that Roon is playing. However, there is no way for the C4 user to program around the various zone grouping issues that I mentioned above through programming. That has to be fixed in the driver.

[noris]

Hi All,

I wanted to let you all know that there is a lot of work happening behind the scenes on the Home Automation side of Roon. Nothing specific I can share just yet, but stay tuned…

[Vincent_Kennedy]

Can you at least tell us if it’s Control4 related? There’s several of us who have deep integrations with HA and might even be interested in testing.

Thanks

[Wolfgang_Heider]

Hi Noris,

I am a Control4 Dealer from Austria. I have the same problem as discussed here before. As soon as the ROON icon is a “favourite” on the home screen on T3, it doesn’t work any more. It doesn’t start to play. If I go to “Listen” first and then to ROON it works without any problems. I talked to the Control4 team yesterday for two hours, and they also believe that the ROON driver is the problem. I hope to have a solution for this problem soon.

Thanks!

Best,
Wolfgang
wwww.homemedia.at

[noris]

Hello All,

We have a few exciting changes to announce, one of which is that we have open-sourced our Control4 module! Please feel free to make any changes needed to the module regarding this issue and submit a pull request at our GitHub, linked below:

GitHub - RoonLabs/control4-roon-driver: open source repo for Control4 driver...

For full announcement details, please see below:

Roon Home Automation Modules - Control4 and Crestron Support Updates

Hello All, We are thrilled to announce some very exciting updates regarding our Home Automation Modules! Roon’s Crestron module is now compatible with Crestron’s 4-Series processors. The module is being managed directly by Crestron’s in-house developers on Crestron’s Application Market, which brings the added benefit of keeping our module compatible with the latest Crestron databases. We are open-sourcing our Control4 module and now any Control4 programmer will be able to add additional f…

Thank you!

[Vincent_Kennedy]

…hands rubbing together with evil laugh.

I can’t wait! I may need to take some vacation so I can play.

Thanks Team Roon.

[Zombeezy]

Hi All - good to see continued discussion on the C4 integration and the announcing open-sourcing the Control4 module hopefully will be a very positive thing. I still have months before I have an operational C4 integration with a Nucleus yet-to-be purchased at a house being renovated.

Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy using Nuimo Control and rooExtend to control Roon music volume from my recliner rather than always grabbing my phone when I have music playing loudly when somebody else comes in the room. Unfortunately, that line-of-sight from the Nuimo Control to my music server will go away with the renovation and an equipment rack install … wait-a-sec, it’s not communicating to the music server with line-of-sight, it is line-of-sight to the raspberry Pi.

Whew… was worried about that. I started looking into devices supporting Matter home automation, looking at all other volume controls that don’t have subscriptions like Josh.ai has, and was really eyeballing the Flic Twist as a volume control once it really comes out.

Maybe I will pick up another Nuimo Control and see about controlling volume from another room now!

And maybe many of the past and present oddities about Control4 integration will be resolved by the time I get my system installed.