Close to roon working remotely...I think

Tinkering
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Ok, first I know this has been talked to death but I feel like I’m kinda close.

First, I have roon core running on an Intel NUC i7. All my media lives on a Synology ds920+. End points are a Denon AVR, a couple of laptops, a couple of ipads a zen Dac and an Android phone. My home internet service is a decent 300/300mbs up and down.

All work perfectly, except for the occasional hiccup here and there but hey that’s the software / operating system world we live in. Been scratching my head now for awhile about how to extend my Roon enjoyment to outside of my home local network. Coming from a Plex media server setup, that originally handled both music and video. The Plex ecosystem was amazing for managing and handling all my video needs, it has/is been terrible for audio. Except for the fact that I can access Plex at home , in my car, at my office … pretty much anywhere I can get internet service.

Which brings me back to Roon.

Recently I have setup a raspberry pi 4 as a VPN server running wireguard on my home network. Now when I am at my office (my windows laptop) or in the car (Android phone) I am able to hit the Roon core and access all the features, search, playlists the complete roon application as if I am home. I can even select and play to the endpoints that are at home.

This is where the fun stops. Although these devices communicate as if they are local, roon core doesn’t recognize them as available endpoints.

Still need to dig a bit deeper but this could be a home router / firewall / port forward issue. So the search will continue. This brings me to the final possibility, that the only thing left is to figure out an easy way to configure a home endpoint to encode and stream back to my remote location the audio stream.

Any suggestions, thoughts, questions, feel free.

Cheers!

Edit -day 2
Setup a wireguard VPN on a raspberry pi. On home network.

Wireguard has clients for both windows and android.

When I activate the VPN tunnel from my office or the mobile I have full access to Roon and it’s functions, the only thing missing now is roon core does not recognize anything remote as a playback device. Just the devices on the local network. I can search and play stuff on my home Denon though driving in the car.

So I’m close just need to figure out the final piece. As a BTW, when I activate the VPN and I’m on the laptop in my office I can attach to the Intel NUC that I use as the Roon core via remote desktop . So I can remote desktop in open roon play a song and it plays out of the remote laptop. Sounded pretty good too. So for less then 100 dollars us for the pi VPN server. It’s a not very elegant way of making this work but it sounds like some of you have this actually figured out.

I do have a Synology NAS 920+ that all my media lives on but I don’t use that for the Roon core or the VPN . Maybe that’s the route?

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I use Zerotier no VPNs and remote devices need to connect over the same ZT network ID. plays back best on wifi or network connections but ive only tested from iPad and MAC roon clients and maybe my FiiO M1 - all can run ZT - caveat the Core machine must also be running ZT - so wont work for ROCK/Nucleus CORE’s

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Firewall on work laptop?

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And then the heavens opened up and you could hear the voices of angles!!

Dude, thank you!

Up and running, no extra gear. The zeroTier was aces!

Had to change course but hey gotta be flexible. Changed out the NUC with an old Lenovo Thinkcenter mini that’s about same size as NUC. And it’s still an i7 windows box. So now, remote laptop can connect to Roon server at home and also works on Google pixel 2XL android mobile.
Next step take pi that I was using for VPN put ZeroTier on that ,add a dac board and see how well that works as remote endpoint this way I don’t tie up laptop.

Thx again.

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Glad you made it happen…ZT is a bit of a thing to get your head around but once you have, it just works -and I havent seen any security issues listed anywhere either :smiley:

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I use ipeng on my iPhone to make my iPhone an endpoint for Roon. When on VPN this works also! I can control my endpoints at home, but also use Roon to my iPhone while being away from home.

http://penguinlovesmusic.de

Although I think Roon should make the system work over VPN by it self, for now this ipeng is my solution.

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@Larry_Barbatsoulis were you able to get your setup to work? I read a little of what you wrote and wanted to let you know it does appear to be a router issue. There are several separate threads where people address this and the common solutions tend to be VPNs and ZT. I haven’t been able to get ZT to work (it only works on my home network), but I have been able to get it to work by enabling OpenVPN on my Netgear Nighthawk R8000 router and installing the corresponding app on my phone.

It’s funny though, like you mentioned in your last post, there are sometimes I open Roon on my phone when away from home and it doesn’t show as device to play to. It’s like Roon knows I’m on the network, but doesn’t know where. I end up having to close and open the Roon app a couple times, or reset the VPN connection to get it to show up again on the list of devices.

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I have been able to get this to work but i had to change path slightly.
Loaded Zero tier on the Intel Computer running my Roon Core, and on every device that i want to use remotely including a raspberry pi4 with a Hifi-berry DAC.
The weird thing about Zerotier on the ipads and my mobile phone is you have to actually turn on ZT for it to work where the desktop / laptops and the Pi stay on net full time. (which actually makes sense, you only want it active when you need it)

But wherever I take the Pi I get full Roon access with a very decent quality DAC (like my office) and my mobile phone (google pixel2) works amazing in my car.

So for me problem solved. Been thinking about putting together a little setup tutorial setting up the ZeroTier, But it was extremely easy setup. Definitely a set it and forget it thing.

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That’s great to hear @Larry_Barbatsoulis. I had been debating about what to put my Roon core on and I ended up going w/ a QNAP NAS. Using ZeroTier on it has proven quite difficult. One has to access it via the terminal and the NAS doesn’t seem to use the exact same commands I’ve been learning to use on Ubuntu. Thank you for responding.

If anyone can offer any insight into router’s interfering with getting ZeroTier or VPNs to work I’d appreciate the feedback. As I mentioned in a prior post, I have been able to get remote access when away from my home network by enabling my router’s OpenVPN. Using TCP has allowed for a more stable connection; however, there are still times my phone will get dropped from the devices list on the Roon app and I’m not sure why, or how to troubleshoot it. I can disable/reenable the OpenVPN connection on my phone, but since most of the time I’m listening in the car, that’s not a safe thing to be doing. The other issue is, it works on public wi-fi, but not other private wi-fi networks (though that might have to do w/ duplicate default gateways but I haven’t been able to test it yet).

If I can, I’d like to work out all the kinks, so, if the music stops while in my car, I’ll know it’s from poor phone reception and from nothing else. Or at least maybe be 95% sure.

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When i read that you were running on a Qnap NAS i had a feeling that was going to be a problem for ZT. But i didn’t want to speak on something i was only guessing at.
Sorry i cant help more on that.

The one thing I have noticed when in the car, Roon doesn’t like to get interrupted, so every time I get a notification on the phone Roon pauses playback for a couple of seconds, its probably a combination of the ZT app and Roon. I have to set the phone in “Do not disturb” mode to silence all the notifications and everything is happy again.

Good luck!

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Have you tried setting your audio device to “Exclusive mode” in Roon settings?