Feature request: Roon providing Volume Leveling Information for HQPlayer

Audio Gear Talk HQ Player
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I am using Roon with HQPlayer for more than a year now and I’m very happy with this combination.

Since I switched from WIFI to wired ethernet for the whole system I have no dropouts anymore with my current favorite settings.

There’s only one thing I’d liked to change:

I know Roon has volume leveling build-in. But for best sound quality it is recommended to stream the source bit-perfect to HQPlayer without any change.

As soon as I stream the source bit-perfect to HQPlayer not using the volume leveling in Roon I always have to adapt the volume manually.

I would like HQPlayer being able to do volume leveling instead of Roon. To do so Roon has to provide that volume level information of each album/song to HQPlayer. In a future version HQPlayer could use that volume level information for volume leveling in HQPlayer.

@jussi_laako: Could you please tell us/Roon, what you need from Roon to enable volume leveling in HQPlayer instead of Roon.

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I’m moving this to Audio Gear Talk > HQ Player since Feedback > Feature Suggestions is for Roon only.

You may want to read this post about volume levelling. I think it is reasonable to say that in most circumstances, you will not loose quality since Roon will not truncate the bits, but shift them.

If your DAC accepts 32 bits you will be fine. However, I’m sure @jussi_laako will confirm if this is an issue.

Roon can’t do this since Roon is sending PCM (or DSD) to the streamer, and this doesn’t include metadata.

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@mjw - I would argue that this discussion was moved incorrectly from Feedback > Feature Suggestions ; this is a feature / enhancement request addressed to Roon, to provide REPLAYGAIN information to HQPlayer.

note: if Roon already provided REPLAYGAIN info and HQPlayer ignored it, I would agree with your decision to move the discussion to Audio Gear Talk > HQ Player ; but we are not there yet.

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I believe the first step is to establish if HQPlayer would utilise such information or whether there is a need for this (as previously mentioned, volume levelling is not problematic and does not result in degradation.)

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“got it” - who was first, the egg or the hen; joke aside, let’s agree to disagree on this one

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Roon just needs to set the HQPlayer volume control (which it already supports) to correct values at any given moment.

There is quite major difference whenever the source media is DSD…

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As far as I know, for volume leveling Roon converts everything to 64 BIT Float.

As soon as I send this to HQPlayer, a lot of ressources are needed on my HQPlayer dedicated Mac. And I am afraid I will not be able to run my favorite HQP settings on my current Mac anymore.

My fav settings on a M4 Max 16 cores 64GB:

1x: sinc-Lh, Nx: sinc-Lh, Modulator: ASDM7EC-fast, Bit rate: 48k x512

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This is only part of the story. What gets to your DAC is either 24 or 32 bit PCM, depending on DAC capabilities. Accuracy is rarely an issue.

Roon doesn’t apply volume levelling to DID.

I just realised I didn’t post the link in my original post. Here it is.