I’d like to use an AU object from Home Audio Fidelity in Roon. The suggestion is to use Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba.
I would like to run Roon Bridge on a Mac mini, pass the audio stream from Roon Server through Audio Hijack, and from there to my USB DAC.
Does anyone have experience with using Roon Bridge and Audio Hijack like this? Does it work as expected?
(I believe Roon itself works fine with Audio Hijack; I’m wondering about Roon Bridge.)
Thank you.
What’s wrong with using Roon’s convolution engine? What does the object do?
The Home Audio Fidelity website talks about it. I’m looking at the Room Shaper plugin.
I already use their convolution filters in Roon. The effect is cumulative with the plugin.
In case anyone searches for this topic:
I was able to get it working as I’ve described, using trial versions of Audio Hijack and the AU component from Home Audio Fidelity.
However, it appears Audio Hijack can only intercept the audio stream if the output device is the Mac System Audio device. That limits the sampling rate to the maximum supported by that device, typically 96kHz with modern Macs.
I’ve asked Rogue Amoeba support if there is a solution. If there is, I will post it here. If there’s no followup in this thread, assume that there is no solution and you’ll have to decide if the time-domain room correction(*) offered by the component is worth the possible resampling.
(*) Standard room correction filters operate in the frequency domain; this AU component operates in the time domain.
I was able to get this working as I desired. The only sort-of compromise (not really) is that I have to put a Roon resampler in the Roon pipeline, meaning the pipeline is not bit perfect.
If anyone wants to run the HAF Room Shaper plugin on a Mac with Roon, this is the solution I came up with:
You will need to use your Mac as the Roon endpoint, directly connected to your DAC. If you have a separate Roon server, you can install Roon Bridge on this endpoint Mac.
Download the HAF Room Shaper plugin and install the AU component in ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/.
Install Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba.
Connect your DAC to the Mac.
If your DAC can support sample rates higher than 96 kHz and you want to use those higher rates, then open the Mac tool “Audio MIDI Setup”. Select your DAC from the list of devices, and using the gear menu at the bottom left, select “Use This Device For Sound Output”. Then, in the Format dropdown, select whatever sample rate you wish to use for your DAC.
Use Audio Hijack to set up a session with a pipeline Application → Room_Shaper plugin → Audio Output. For the Application, choose Roon or Roon Bridge, whichever you set up on your Mac. For Audio Output, select your DAC.
You can interact with the Room_Shaper plugin within Audio Hijack to upload your impulse response files, run the computations, and set the various parameters.
If you prefer to use a Roon resampler to the macOS resampler, you will need to create one in the Roon DSP (MUSE) setup. Have it resample everything to whatever sample rate you set for your DAC in Audio MIDI Setup. If you don’t, then macOS will do the resampling for you. The macOS resampler is supposedly very good, but it’s your choice.
Your Roon audio output should be “System Output” on your Mac. You cannot use CoreAudio Exclusive Mode (aka hog mode) or Audio Hijack cannot use it. This also means your Roon quality indicator will be green, not purple or even blue. I know some people are greatly bothered by this, so fair warning.
Start the Audio Hijack session, and begin playing from Roon. Audio Hijack will show the pipeline running, passing audio from Roon/Roon Bridge to the Room_Shaper AU component, to your DAC.
Hope this helps someone.
If you are also using HAF room correction convolutions in Roon, or you’ve created your own with REW, be sure to turn them ON when you create the impulse response files to feed into the Room Shaper AU component.
Won’t be bit perfect using any form of DSP so your not loosing out on that side of things with Roon resampling.
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