This makes me wonder how many installations are out there which don’t support CD listening like this at all - no CD player / no Blu-ray player? Might be an interesting poll. 
But why would they re-architect and code the entire app for an edge case outside of the app philosophy? In SW development terms it doesn’t fit and would fall out at triage I think.
No harm in asking obviously, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
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This is my point about the meta info. Meta aside, I would think that it would be close to the same at accessing a music file no matter of location just for audio processing.
Just a thought.
–MD
You can do this with a USB stick, because the contents are already data files. You can’t do this with a music CD because the contents are not already data files. Roon (and many new music players, e.g. Groove) doesn’t support direct playback from music CDs.
Geoff - Would this process be like a normal import into the database with all of the meta data?
I don’t think this is an edge case at all.
Seems a very odd idea to get Roon… Then wonder about playing a CD! A primary reason for me going with Roon was to abandon discs for good. I can’t imagine playing a disc again.Takes all sorts, I suppose.
Did it occur to anyone to retain a cheap CD transport for this (unlikely) scenario?
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“Roon looks at your music and finds photos, bios, reviews, lyrics, and concert dates, and makes connections between artists, composers, performers, conductors, and producers. What you get is a searchable, surfable magazine about your music.”
How does adding a physical CD player with no meta data input fit in?
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It doesn’t.
Buy a CD transport people! Or better still, rip the CD and play via Roon. It’s the future! 
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Yes, it is an import. I think I’ve discovered a bug in the process though, so I’ll document this in a post in the Support category. Watch this space… I’ll post a link here once it’s done.
It’s done:
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The closest you could get to “real time” playback of a CD would be having something like Vortexbox on your network. Insert CD -> Vortexbox rips CD with no user interaction -> Album added to library immediately by virture of being ripped to watched folder -> Play.
Still about 4 minutes to rip, mind. Go make a coffee 
Lots of Roon Kool Aid being consumed today! Digital music player that takes 15 steps to play a commercial CD from a CD-ROM drive and won’t play a single file without a full import. A little convoluted.
Yes I understand the primary purpose of Roon. But to say that playing CDs just doesn’t fit the paradigm is the edge case. I was in the future in the mid 90s building media PCs when MP3s came out. Way ahead of all of y’all. But I still feel that Roon is Byzantine when it comes to playing portable media.
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But you are conflating Roon with media players like MediaMonkey, foobar and Jriver. It’s made for a different market. If you are a Roon user, why would you want to play a CD through Roon without adding it to the library? Yes, that is proper edge case.
CD is legacy. If you want to play CDs, attach some outputs to your PC soundcard or buy a CD player.
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Why do you want to play a CD with Roon? What would Roon do for CD playback? If you don’t want the metadata and library cross-referencing, what would be the point? Why haven’t you already ripped the CD anyway?
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I feel that using portable media in any form is a bit ‘Byzantine’ if were going to be all modern about it.
It is several years now since I used anything other than internet music streaming even in my car. (Which is my one real winge about Roon - no way to get the music outside my home wifi network to wherever my phone is).
I don’t even have any music on my phone anymore, nor have I carried around music on a USB drive from probably well over a decade. I think the last time I was carting a bunch of mp3s around was back in my DJing days, but that stopped when decent DJ software became available on a mac laptop.
I still have CDs - lots of them - in various boxes wasting space. Apparently I should keep them as proof of ownership of all that I have on my NAS that was ripped, though here in the UK I guess I’m guilty of being a pirate regardless as ripping is apparently illegal anyway, so probably may as well sell them.
The ideal however of carting any of them around to a friends house these days is however just plain weird unless they happen to be hermits/hippies who live way way out in the sticks and off the grid. Playing my choice of music in most friends houses these days is usually a case of casting from my phone via airplay to their AVR/streamer or whatever (or at least for those friends that I visit often enough to connect to their wifi).
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How much?
Building media PCs was ahead of some of the guys here? I think you might find there are people who worked for companies that defined the standards lurking around.
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There are plenty of use cases. Including, as suggested by the poster of the original request, that a friend brings over a USB stick or a music CD, and allowing that to be played within the Roon eco-system, out the same endpoint, the good DAC, and the friend’s tracks intermingled in the queue with the user’s Roon library.
Just because it isn’t something you would do doesn’t make it an edge case. It’s a perfectly normal digital music use case. The process of playing temporary media is convoluted in Roon.
To be honest, I would probably not play a CD through Roon more than once per year. But it does bother me when the Roonies who conflate Roon with “The Perfect Savior” gang up on a perfectly reasonable suggestion from someone new to the forum and make posters feel unwelcome by pointing out that they should just use other software if Roon doesn’t do what they suggest. This poster was sharing his thoughts, and the undercurrents of the response was that “he’s wrong.”
There is an underlying current of “Roon is perfect for me. If I don’t want the suggested feature, I am going to attack it.” Other forum regulars have pointed this out before. My original point was it’s not an edge case and while it is fine to point out a workaround, this almost religious worship of the product as-is can feel rather reactionary.
I don’t mean to start a big battle with the posters here. I’m sure if we grabbed a beer and played some tunes we would get along fine. I would just ask that posters realize that not everyone fits into the narrowest of Roon use cases only, and that doesn’t make it an edge case.
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I’m not arguing against playing CDs or media per se or your and others desire for it. it’s just that if you read the responses the roon team make to things such as being able to browse file folders for example they have their own vision and view on what they want roon to be.
In that context alone then playing music without it’s context doesn’t fit. I’m not saying I think it is a good or bad thing just that as far as I as an outsider can see it is not likely to be a core deliverable. And if it isn’t at the core, given all the other stuff they want to do…
I wasn’t trying to be provocative just set expectations of success😐