Hello!
I stumbled accross Roon the other day and must say I am very excited about this.
Coming from the Linn world I was happy to read elsewhere on this forum that Roon will ship with openhome compatibility and songcast compatibility. Does this mean that Roon will integrate nicely into a Linn system? Both regarding sending tracks to the playlist, but also for using songcast in a multiroom setup.
I think there would be a huge market possibility for Roon if it would work within the Linn and Openhome systems.
We havenât announced anything yet, but Linn just sent us some gear and we are going to test our Songcast implementation very shortly.
Iâm hoping we can announce something next week at the High End Show in Munich.
OpenHome is in very early design phase, so dont hold your breath for that. Songcast should work well.
Thanks for the feedback! I am looking forward to test your app in due time. And hereâs to hoping youâll get Openhome in there in soon.
what specific features/use cases do you use from openhome? part of our design phase is figuring out how people use openhome
Thanks for asking!
I have several players (Linn DS). Typical usage is like this:
To play music I need to build a playlist. To do this I use a control point (Kinsky or Kazoo, both by Linn, or bubbledsnext on android) to browse my collection (served by minimserver on NAS, or Tidal) and send a playlist to the DS. This playlist is stored on the DS, so the device used to build the playlist doesnât need to be on during playback. Playback is gapless. All of this part of the Openhome protocols, and I guess I am thinking of Roon as a combined server and control point in this sense. To be able to browse music and send it to one of my players (openhome playlist)
Apart from creating and controlling playlists for the different players/rooms, I can also play music in perfect sync in several rooms (players) using Songcast. To do this, instead of creating/chosing a playlist for a certain Openhome/DS player, Iâd rather let it âtune inâ (as a Songcast receiver) to any of my other players (that acts as a Songcast sender). The playlist of the Songcast sender will play in sync at the chosen Songcast receivers. It would be nice to control this within Roon and also use Roon for extending the multirrom setup by creating more recievers and senders.
My hope for Roon is that it will let me browse music, and then let me play it on any of my players and ultimately let me control multiroom Songcast and even let me easily create new songcast receivers for more rooms by installing Roon on a small Pc or Raspberry Pi.
I am sure you have already read these pages, but Iâm linking for reference.
http://www.openhome.org/wiki/OhMedia
http://www.openhome.org/wiki/OhMediaDevelopers
http://www.openhome.org/wiki/OhNet
Congratulations on the release!
I downloaded and installed the trial and all looks very impressing.
I was excited to see on your front page that you support Linn hardware.
However, unfortunately I canât play to my Linn players. They seem to be recognized by Roon as airplay receivers. When I play to any of them, they reboot, and then there is a white noise for a half second, and then they put themselves into playlist mode.
Will there be a software update from Linn to make this work, or is this a bug in Roon?
Also, Airplay is of lower quality than direct streaming.
Will there be Playlist compatibility between Roon and Linn instead (as in Openhome playlist source)?
Hereâs to hoping this will work. Otherwise unfortunately Roon wonât work in my setup.
Cheers,
Frassepe
We are working on Songcast support so that Roon can stream directly to your receivers in a high quality fashion. We have a working prototype of the functionality, but it needs to be made stable and real. Itâs coming soon.
We are aware of and are looking into the AirPlay issueâbut Songcast is a better way to integrate your hardware than AirPlay. Iâm confident that we will be able to get that working.
Integrating with playlist mode is a significantly larger piece of work for us, since Roon manages its own transport, queue, etc, and our product concepts do not mesh easily with some of the decisions that Linn has made. Any support of that nature would be a bit further out in the roadmap.
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Hi guys!
Is there an ETA for Songcast integration?
Thanks.
@frassepe â sorry, no ETA is available⊠we ran into some issues with unexpected instability in Linnâs OpenHome code.
What device do you want to use Songcast with?
Hi Danny,
Thanks for the feedback. I have two Linn DS players (Klimax DS and Sneaky DS).
I sure hope you can get the instabilities in the code to get working. I saw that Openhome / Linn recently have released binaries for the OhMediaPlayer, and that songcast is part of that. Maybe there are useful bits in the headers?
http://www.openhome.org/releases/artifacts/ohMediaPlayer/
Cheers 
thatâs what we are using.
Hi Danny,
Thanks again for the answer. 
And sorry to hear the Openhome code isnât up to speed. Are you dropping Songcast because of this? 
Cheers
no, not dropping it⊠just need to find fix or replacementâŠ
@danny Sorry to hear that youâve had difficulties getting Songcast working. Weâre also a bit surprised to hear about this via a post to your forum rather than more directly.
There are several third party implementations of songcast so it is quite possible to implement a sender. Please feel free to post any questions to the OpenHome Media forum.
Is songcast coming? Since it is mentioned on the Roon homepage to âwork with songcastâ I am getting a bit disappointed. I thought it was very iminent to be implemented since it apparently wasnât ready at launch. I canât use Roon in my setup until this works.
I think the manufacturersâ logos on the frontpage of the Roon website have been placed there to indicate hardware parties Roon is actively working with. The âworks with Songcastâ in the Linn logo is a bit unfortunate at the moment â it may be wise the replace with a more neutral Linn logo until Songcast support is actually ready.
Just a quick note to add another voice in favor of Songcast supportâŠwould love to see this!