I’m building a raspberry pi to try as an endpoint instead of my mac mini.
The progress so far is using a rasptouch with the OS picoreplayer.
But that OS only comes with squeezelite, not with roonbridge.
So, starting the battle to get roonbridge added or to go with a different OS.
Actually sounds very good already.
But wondering if I do need to switch for “best” quality as I imaging talking to squeezelite is probably not using RAAT so is probably suboptimal?
Anyone for example tried both and have an opinion?
Thanks!
In this kind of setup I dropped picore and use RoPieee as endpoint on different raspberries ever since. Integrates sooo nicely with roon and I can easily upscale the RoPieee with external DACs if needed. Why should I use an emulation if RoPieee offers native roon support. Works for me. But watch temperature on the raspberry clients. Yesterday I learned that a client’s hardware died silently probably from heat problems.
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Alex
What HAT are you using with the RaspTouch? If the screen on the RaspTouch is the official 7 inch Pi screen, swap the storage card out for one with Ropieee on it, configure it for the HAT (or try different ones until one works) and use that. It will be a dedicated Roon endpoint. You can swap back and forth and see what you think. I’ve had my eye on the RaspTouch devices for a while. I’m putting something together DIY as proof of concept which might do the same for less because my main endpoint is sorted.
I have recently replaced two Squeezebox Touch as Roon endpoints with the Orchard Audio PecanPi Streamers running Ropieee. The DAC hat in these is exceptional and runs circles around the SB Touches. And as @azche24 mentioned, Ropieee is so easy to use and works great. You can buy the PecanPi DAC HAT and case separately. It’s an easy kit to assemble. Check out Orchard Audio PecanPi
I did this to move all my endpoints to using Roon RAAT which provides the ability to sync multiple endpoints to play together. While Roon did an amazing job integrating the ability to stream to a Squeezebox, that is now pretty much a legacy platform and it seemed a good time to move on.
When I first started with Roon, there was no RoonBridge available for the RPi - picore and the Squeezebox legacy support in Roon was all that was available. So that was my starting point. Once RoonBridge became available, I moved to that, and never looked back. I’ve got RPis running both DietPi and Ropieee. The former I use when I need to have other Linux software running (e.g. the Roon Extension Manager). Ropieee is my go-to choice for a RoonBridge appliance; just turn it on and forget about it.
Thanks all for the help.
Put ropieee on another microsd card, and got the rasptouch booted.
After a bit of mucking got the screen oriented the right way, and the right HAT selected such that it’s now feeding my DAC. Excellent!
But the screen of the rasptouch says “Connection failure” instead of showing anything useful.
Rooncore is running, but not sure about other option for failure it gives as the roopie remote control extension. Via the web interface I did click “restart” on the extension but still the error.
Thoughts welcome, most appreciated…
Got it all sorted.
Had to enable the extension in roon.
Then was getting a zone unknown failure.
So had to set ropieee to have the same device name as the roon zone.
Now, up and running, display is showing now playing, music streaming!
Rats, not all sorted.
Somehow the endpoint is being airplayed to (rather than roon bridged?) and I’m losing quality.
Don’t see where to configure roon bridge preferred or such a thing…
Hah (for the record, if anyone else hits these problems).
Using ropieeexl, the device shows up in 2 places in the roon audio settings, once as its own roon device and once as an airplay device. Had to configure the name to sync with ropieee and select the right zone, and now getting proper resolution.
On to breaking in the rasptouch and then some critical listening to see how it acquits itself…
Excellent! Let us know how you get on with it. It is strange that company doesn’t acknowledge Ropieee with Roon as an option on their kit, but it does seem to work well.
