HQ Player Integration [SOLVED]

Hi Jason,

Danny referred to it above as being in the “short term schedule” so far as Roon are concerned. We’ve also been told above that Jussi has provided code to Roon, which seems very promising.

It may be that neither company is in a position to confirm anything publicly until they’ve reached agreement between themselves. I think it would be tremendously synergistic for both Roon and HQPlayer if integration occurred.

What is short term ??? I see it being discussed as far back as the beginning of June.

That post is inaccurate.

My understanding is that Roon and HQPlayer aren’t being integrated in the sense of being tightly bound together as a single entity. Rather they will continue to exist as standalone applications with Roon able to control HQPlayer through its control API; as such there are no licensing dependencies. That is the way Muso and HQPlayer coexist. The only way I could see a licensing dependency under that arrangement would be if a product bundle were to be made available.

Ray

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Not necessarily, @Ray_Paice.

Roon and Tidal are both separate licences but are integrated.

It doesn’t mean that Roon and HQP will be similar but options do exist.

Here are the words of Jussi, the man behind HQPlayer, in response to a query I sent him;

"At the moment HQPlayer is licensed independently. What ever front-end is used to control HQPlayer via it’s control API doesn’t have effect on HQPlayer licensing.

So I’d say I share your understanding.

Naturally there are theoretical future possibilities. But non-existent things are not worth speculating."

Based on that statement and on my understanding of the word integrated;

Free Dictionary

I don’t believe Roon and HQPlayer are currently being integrated, rather, HQPlayer has an exposed control API (I would guess that is the code that has been discussed as being supplied to Roon) that Roon can use to control HQPlayer, which is actually all that is needed. The good news is that whilst an integration of Roon and HQPlayer would be a significant and time-consuming undertaking, to hook up Roon and HQPlayer via the API shouldn’t be a big deal and it has already been done my Muso, which can control HQPlayer.

Ray

@Ray_Paice has it right. We are not bundling or combining the two in any way. HQ Player and Roon will communicate over an API HQ Player provides. If your HQ Player has that same API, I don’t see why you’d have to buy another license. If it doesn’t, then of course you will need to get the HQ Player that does.

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

A post was split to a new topic: 64 Bit Roon Applications

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.