Thanks for clarifying Danny.
What news of the interfacing of Roon and HQPlayer - any ETA in sight?
I’ve been very impressed with Roon since I signed up to the trial BTW.
Ray
Squeezebox is almost ready, we’ve just been testing with more and more gear and gearing up for release. Lots of QA in progress.
HQ Player is next, and should be able to leverage the work from Squeezebox, so it should go quick. I cant promise an ETA. We all know you guys are waiting!
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Cheers Danny
Just signed on for life membership with the promise of soon ROON playing through HQplayer. The elephant in the room has been ROON’s SQ. Not bad but to my ears not up to other Mac players. Being a bitperfect through least resistance playyback devotee I was dubious of HQplayer but with ROON’s coming ability to play with HQplayer was curious to try. OMG the musicality with HQplayer is something I have not heard digitally and want to listen to more and more. Cann’t wait for ROON to be the library end of 2 amazing products.
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[quote=“Egres, post:87, topic:1656”]
The elephant in the room has been ROON’s SQ.
[/quote]Roon outputs bit perfect audio quality … if you like what HQPlayer is doing then what your really saying is you prefer the upsampling algorithms in HQPlayer than those in your DAC. It’s not really about Roon per se.
I’m using Roon to drive my Meridian system via a Sooloos ID40 LAN connected audio end point card … I’ve listened very intensely and can say hand of heart there is ZERO difference AQ wise when I drive it via Roon or Sooloos.
Also I can output DTS encoded material that then decodes just fine, this is a good test to determine if the stream is bit perfect or not.
BTW I think Roon being able to drive HQplayer is great … but it should not be seen as a reflection of ‘poor’ AQ from Roon.
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There are a lot of people that hear differences between bitperfect players. I don’t want this forum to be a debate on that point.
The big point is that HQplayer’s algorithms are a game changer for SQ just like ROON’s were for library management etc. Marry the 2 and oh boy, that’s game changing. Enough for me to now sign on as a “lifer”.
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I know it is still a work in progress, but will the future HQ Player integration work with Roon if the playback computer is only running Roon Speakers instead of the server or full application?
HQPlayer supports streaming to (very) thin client network audio devices which it calls Network Audio Adaptors (NAA). RoonSpeakers and RoonReady devices will be (fatter) thin client network audio devices (endpoints). Can’t see any reason why they couldn’t be NAAs to an integrated HQPlayer running on the Core.
Edit: This is all purely wild-eyed speculation.
You need to think of Roon and HQPlayer as separate applications and the 'integration of the two will just be a control interface - i.e. they will be able to ‘talk’ to each other.
HQ Player has it’s own lightweight endpoint application called ‘Network Audio Adaptor’ (NAA) which is a proprietary HQPlayer module. The main HQPlayer application discovers the NAAs and you can then choose to send the output from the player to the selected NAA. If you want to sent HQPlayer output to a remote device this is what you’ll have to use and I very much doubt if NAA will ‘understand’ about Roon output or if HQPlayer will ‘understand’ the RoonSpeakers endpoint. Of course, depending on the underlying HW/OS platforms supported it may be possible to install HQPlayer and Roon endpoint software on the same platform.
So, if I understand you correctly and you want to have a remote endpoint for HQPlayer you will need the Roon library application to interface with the full HQPlayer application which will then send its output to an HQPlayer NAA endpoint.
BTW, I’m trying out HQPlayer NAA at the moment. I’m using an old Intel Atom computer with an ArchLinux distribution and the NAA module installed. It seems to work very well.
Ray
Jussi has said at computeraudiophile that as he understands it, if you use HQP NAA, Roon send your signal to HQP; HQP will do the processing it’s been told to do; and then it will send the result to the NAA. If you don’t use NAA, the the process will be: Select music in Roon>data sent to HQP>HQP does it’s thing>HQP outputs however you’ve set it up to output.
He also indicated that an existing HQP license would be all that’s needed, as the 2 programs aren’t actually going to be integrated, but just talk to one another/work with each other. You will need a license for each one.
Both of the above were in answer to queries from me.
If we could send an audio stream to HQP to do it’s thing and then return the result back for Roon for output to zones I’d be happy.
just use the NAA program anywhere you want to have a zone! it can go on any mac, win, linux computer. theres some devices that support it
That may be how it ends up working (I have no idea), but there is a good deal of functionality in the Roon zones that it would be a shame to lose. Multi-zone playback, zone transfer, cross-fade, volume levelling etc. I would have to accept, however, that those things are less important to the target market for HQP.
The implementation of RAAT in consumer Roon-Ready devices, however, means Roon will (in time) support a lot of network zones that won’t be able to (readily) run the NAA program.
I’m speaking selfishly here because I haven’t seen any plans for Auralic to implement NAA on the Aries, but it will be RoonReady as soon as practicable.
Edit: Maybe Roon could be an NAA so that HQP just returns the stream to it.
I am looking forward to HQPlayer integration/communication with Roon.
I would like to let you know that, although I am a normal user, I am also a HQPlayer reseller due to a special agreement with HQPlayer designer. I can offer very favorable conditions. Please PM me if interested.
Does anyone know where Apple Lossless files fit into this? What I want to believe is that if I don’t use HQP NAA, Roon will decode ALAC files and send the audio data to HQP to do its thing, so effectively, I’ll be able to play back ALAC files via HQP, which doesn’t currently handle ALAC on its own. True, nobody knows yet, or I’m completely delusional?
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To expand on David Orgel’s point, Roon supports several file formats that HQPlayer doesn’t. I’m hoping that Roon will take any file format it can accept and convert it to WAV (or send DSD data natively, of course) prior to interfacing with HQPlayer.
If that were the case, it would allow for HQPlayer upsampling of ALAC and even the dreaded lossy formats.
I’m as much of a purist as anyone with 95% of my large collection in Redbook or above or DSD, but there is a very small percentage of music that was only released digitally and has never been and never will be available in a lossless format.
Anyway, if Roon interfaces with HQPlayer in this fashion, it would essentially make HQPlayer format agnostic. That would be yet another benefit that (only?) the combination of Roon and HQPlayer could provide.
I’ve been using Roon under the trial arrangement for the last ten days or so and have to say I’m very impressed with its richness of content and great interface. However, I can’t use that excellence without an interface to HQPlayer, which I’m sold on and about to license, so I’ve reluctantly terminated the Roon trial. I will keep an eye on Roon developments and anticipate taking out a membership when the hookup to HQPlayer becomes available.
Ray
Dear Roon, any way we can sign up to be beta testers for HQPlayer integration? I’m a life time subscriber who is eagerly waiting for HQPlayer support! Thanks!
Just out of interest, when the hook up to HQPlayer becomes available where will it be notified. I had quick look and I can’t see an obvious place where new releases, with info on what they contain, are ‘advertised’?
Ray