Why should it be so hard for me (with a Roon Nucleus, android devices, and linux computers) to export lists of albums and the contents of playlists to a text file? The only solution I’ve found is to use a third-party site (Tune My Music) to access my TIDAL library, which of course doesn’t include Roon playlists. That’s my question/comment; the gory details follow.
When I temporarily lost access to most of my Roon library in November (possibly because of a Cloudflare outage), I decided I had to revisit the vexing issue of how to export lists of albums and playlists from my Nucleus to a text file. The Roon app for android can’t do this, nor can Roon installed on a linux box. You need to have a Windows box or a Mac.
Some users have been able to get Wine for linux to run the Roon client. I couldn’t. I installed Wine and downloaded the Roon Windows installer, which failed. ChatGPT told me, “Roon 2.0’s installer is incompatible with Wine, likely due to its reliance on Windows-specific APIs and CPU feature detection.” I uninstalled Wine and then found that the innumerable 32-bit libraries it left behind had broken the update system on my linux box. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the mess.
Some have recommended a linux package called RoonCommandLine. I installed it and then spent hours trying to get the linux box to communicate with the Nucleus. That proved impossible, because the token file needed by RoonCommandline did not exist, and could not be generated by the Roon app on android devices. ChatGPT encouraged me to jigger my router settings to “enable multicast forwarding or IGMP proxy and allow LAN-to-LAN UDP traffic on port 9003”, but I demurred.
Another recommended approach – which was abhorrent to me, but I was desperate – was to install a Windows VM on a linux box and then install the Roon client on the VM. I used KVM/QEMU to create a Windows 10 VM, and then tried to install Roon Remote, thinking, this is it, I’m almost there. But … “Roon could not find WGL functions required to initialize OpenGL”, so it was impossible to start the program. Somewhere on the web I found the comment that “KVM, QEMU and virt-manager don’t have a working feature that could provide OpenGL to a Windows 10 guest. Virtio GPUs won’t work properly with Windows and appear to be limited to a backward-compatible VGA mode with ~2 fps and 800×600.” Of course!
So, I’m using Tune My Music to export a list of my TIDAL albums from time to time. Obviously, it can’t access my Roon playlists, which I’ve spent many many hours curating, so I’m hoping Roon lives longer than I do, which became more likely after all the stress I put myself through by tackling this challenge. No, I won’t buy a Windows machine; it was painful enough having the Windows VM living on my linux box for a few days.
How hard would it be to enable the Roon app for android to export lists of library contents the way Roon clients for Windows machines and Macs do? Between the price of the Nucleus and seven years’ worth of subscription fees, I’ve poured a lot of money into Roon. It would be so nice if Roon Support would actually do something for linux and android users, instead of just letting their anguished comments die after 7 days of inactivity!