I sometimes watch movies on my laptop, which I also use as my main Roon remote, sitting on my chair in front of my sound system. I sit too far away for cables, and anyway, cables are a PITA. I send Roon to my DAC over Ethernet.
It would be very cool if I could use Roon as a channel to send audio from my movies to my DAC. I thought about ways I might do this, and came up with a solution: I set up my own Internet radio station. Unfortunately the performance of the broadcast is poor and latency is much too high. Anyway, this strikes me as an inelegant solution. Why not simply create a “stream” from my computer’s own audio?
I’ve seen that topic for ages but never clicked on it, and didn’t make the connection. It strikes me that it should be straightforward (from my novice pov), since there’s really just one thing to stream: the computer’s core output.
Then you could stream anything through Roon dependent on your operating system. Two big no’s for Roon. Un- curated content and variance in the capability of Roon between operating systems.
Henry, I’m not sure this makes sense. It would be no less curated: I would be curating it, much as I curate it now when I set up a playlist or play an Internet radio station. Capabilities between different platforms would not need to vary any more than they do now: Regardless of platform, it could be set up to stream the output of the applicable core audio API.
Your message made me think of a rather obvious complication, probably the one you were thinking of. With ROCK as a core, there would be no need for the feature I’m requesting–and I’m in fact running ROCK. The computer I want to pipe audio from (for movies, etc) is a remote, not the core, and that does indeed sound more complicated. In principle though–the principle we were discussing–ROCK is intentionally less capable than other Roon implementations: it’s a bug, not a feature. You can’t type a document on it, and you can’t watch a movie on it. I don’t think that needs to be important in determining Roon’s feature set. The complication of running audio from movies from a remote remains, however.
Thought I would add. I’m not trying to score any particular point here–just offer a little encouragement to pursue this feature. From the Roon Knowledge Base:
We like to think of RAAT as AirPlay for Audiophiles.
and
RAAT is plumbing. It gets the audio from point A to point B without screwing it up, and without bringing limitations to the table that might compel the software/hardware on either side of it to screw things up. It’s an enabling technology for “doing things right” everywhere else in the system. Otherwise, it shouldn’t get in the way.