Hi all
Have any of you tried outputting Roon through Soundcast for OSX? It lets you cast system audio from the Mac to Chromecast audio devices.
Just read about it - haven’t tried myself.
You might be interested in this article from Computer Audiophile.
Johnny Antiu from Style Jukebox replied to an email saying they’d have chrome cast support within weeks.
Roon will have chrome cast support at some point. They have not published when though. It might not be soon.
Just installed Soundcast and it only sees one of my chromecasts. Refreshing the list then shows the other, but loses the first. Not sure if it’s quite ready for prime-time.
Not sure how even roon will develop a stable solution without an official desktop cast SDK. But I know nothing about these things, really.
There is now a part 2 Chromecast Audio review from Hans Beekhuyzen on You Tube. You and others will remember from earlier in this thread that he panned the CCA in the original review for which you provided a link. Although the review is more about Plex than the CCA, he does eventually get round to changing his original opinion about the CCA.
EDIT - I forgot to add the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN5MhrQQqp0
Yep, I saw this; very interesting (Plex doesn’t index Composers, so not much good for classical music, but it’s my stopgap for now). I like his channel very much. Just waiting for Roon to implement cast now.
Currently using Airfoil 5.5 on my Mac Mini that is running Roon to send audio to 5 Chromecast Audios I have around my house and it works well.
Setup is: RoonServer -> Playing to Built-In Audio in CoreAudio Exclusive mode (so Roon can control sample rate) -> Airfoil capturing audio from RoonServer -> Send audio to Chromecast
Means I can’t have each chromecast playing different music, but I can have the audio playing in sync out of every chromecast is my house at the same time.
It’s a setup that works nicely until Roon has official Chromecast support.
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I’m assuming that Airfoil is limited to 16/48 ? The higher capability of the Chromecast Audio would make it an ideal endpoint when Roon are able to support
I’m generally playing CD quality, so 16/44.1. I have played higher quality 24/96 just to see if it would even play and it does, but it’s very hard to tell whether it’s being down sampled as neither Airfoil or the Google Home app tells you the rate being played.
As the Chromecasts are in my kids bedrooms, the kitchen etc. just having it work is fine for me at the moment. It’s a workaround until real support appears in Roon, so I’m realistic about what I can achieve.
I will see if I can find a way to work out what down sampling is being applied and report back here if I manage it.
Hi Brian
Can you comment on the current status and progress with the implementation of chromecast in Roon?
Regards, Christian
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I’m interested in this as well.
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a while back I did come casting though a chromecast audio from my NAS drive using a DAC that will display the bitrate being used, and I can confirm that it was outputting 96/24.
Daniel_Filocha’s post gave me an idea so I did some testing with Airfoil.
I connected a Chromecast Audio via Toslink to my Linn Sekrit. I then played some music from Plex, which has native Chromecast support. The Kazoo control point then happily told me the rate being received by the Linn through Toslink from the Chromecast.
I played some 16/44.1 flac files and then some 24/96 as well. In each case I could see the files being played at the correct rate when casting from Plex.
I then played the same 24/96 files from Roon. The signal path in Roon confirmed it was playing at the correct rate, as did the connected DAC. I then turned Airfoil on to cast to the Chromecast and checked in Kazoo to see the rate. It was playing at 24/48 when playing through Airfoil.
Airfoil must be converting and appears to have a maximum of 24/48 playback.
I am currently a Plex user searching for something like Roon to handle my music in a more elegant way, in a more pleasing interface, but the lack of Chromecast support is currently a dealbreaker for me. I’m bookmarking this thread to keep track of updates. Hopefully, this can be addressed soon, as I know that would open the door for a lot of Plex users to evaluating Roon for their music needs.
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Hi,
are there any newy about the chromcast Audio as an endpoint? Does it work in 1.3?
Greetings Stefan
Nope – no news and no support in 1.3. Roon’s roadmap is long and wide. 
I guess I’m in a different camp on CA because I found it to be rather terrible in terms of sound. After being disappointed, I read an article on DAR that confirmed it for me.
I have seen comments about Chromecast Audio (CCA) delivering poor sound earlier in this thread, but ‘terrible’ takes it to a new level. I responded to a link to a Hans Beekhuyzen (HB) review earlier in this thread, and then posted a link to a ‘corrected’ review by HB. (see post number 125 in this thread). I can understand that people can have a differing perception about how well or not the CCA device works for them, but if you have heard it sounding ‘terrible’ then I would say that something in your setup was horribly wrong. I use the CCA via its toslink output with Spotify and the sound quality is very good.
My biggest gripe with the CCA is lack of gapless playback. As and when Roon support the CCA we are promised gapless playback because Roon will not be sending files to the CCA.
Yes.There are many that disagree with the DAR view and I’ve certainly heard worse.
I certainly wouldn’t call the sound quality from a CCA ‘terrible’. As mentioned earlier in this thread, I have multiple CCAs in my house each connected to varying quality bluetooth speakers via the line-in connectors and the sound quality is perfectly acceptable for this usage. As a cheap means to get good quality multi-room audio, they are hard to beat. You just have to be realistic in your expectations for a device that you can get for as low as £15 if you shop around.
I’m happily driving the CCAs from Roon on my Mac Mini Server by using Airfoil. The 1.3 release has made this scenario even better with its DSP Engine as I can get Roon to do high quality up/down sampling to the rate Airfoil uses before it then sends to the CCA. The music is even gapless in this scenario as Airfoil sends the audio as a single constant stream.
Of course, I’m still looking forward to native Chomecast support in Roon