Multi-location and mobile Roon usage

I’m wondering if this feature would also incorporate some sort of transcoding to a lossy (less bandwidth and storage-hungry) format? We’re not all blessed with high upload bandwidths, so remote play would only be useful to me if I can actually stream my music in the first place…

With all the streaming services (Spotify, TIDAL, etc) I know that most music can be played remotely anyway, but it sounds so much better when playing from your own collection! :stuck_out_tongue:

For remote play I currently use LMS as it transcodes to MP3 when I’m streaming, but the “endpoint” applications available are nowhere near as polished as Roon, so to have it available here would be fantastic.

Better to load your music up with FLACs while you’re at home on Wifi, don’t you think?

I’ve yet to come across a mobile phone with 2TB of local storage :wink:

When on-the-go, audio quality is not as important as size (since typically I’d be on lower-quality headphones or speakers). Having access to my full collection at any time is what’s important here (first-world problems, I know!)…

As I mentioned, I already have this capability via LMS (and could always revert to Spotify, TIDAL, etc)… just being able to do it in Roon would be perfect…

Thanks for the suggestion. As I was just engaging in a bit of theoretical conjecture about how Roon could achieve the mobile usage you go on about, perhaps you would like to join in and give your concepts. I was enjoying a bit of coffee then and I certainly never claimed to have created an exhaustive list.

For example, Roon could create a “Teamviewer-like” setup; but, that would also require Roon to increase their own server load as suddenly they would be making/authenticating and perhaps in some instances maintaining connections between home and remote.

Nor I one with 6Tb. So what do I do? MP3 won’t bring all my music onto my phone either. :frowning:

Hence an “offline mode” which is loaded in advance from the server over WLAN at home.

(I believe this is @danny’s area.)

Don’t hold me to the details, but the hope here is to turn your home into a mini-streaming service just for yourself. If you had TIDAL content, we’d get it from TIDAL, but if you only had it at home, we’d stream it from your home.

There is also the idea of “offline”. Roon would use your local storage on the mobile device to cache songs so they would accessible without internet (from TIDAL and from your home). This could be explicit and/or automatically done based on your listening habits.

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any general indication of a timeframe? or is that a detail? :blush:

the private streaming option sounds interesting. the offline mode is essential. thanks for the update.

I travel a lot…sometimes my data is not accessible like when on a plane…there I would love to be able to have a preloaded setup of music…now doing this with HF Player from Onkyo for my iOS devices…over several devices I can take quite a bit of content, but when I get to my hotel I also would like to have remote access to my music, or even at a friend’s house etc, when I have full access to stream to a better playback setup than headphones perhaps too.

We wait with bated breath :sunglasses:

It’s the “loaded in advance” I have issues with. I could load FLACs (or MP3s) in advance on my phone, if I knew what I’d want to listen to in the future…

I do have an alternate temporary solution too, FYI. I have transcoded all my music to MP3 and I’m using Google Play Music to upload them to my account.

This does allow me to stream and even download for offline use wherever I am (without having to think in advance what I want to pre-load onto my phone/tablet/etc). But I have issues with this service… since they use tag matching, they tracks they have in their library sometimes have atrocious compression or quality (audibly different to my MP3s, let alone the original FLACs). Also not everything is tagged to my liking, album art is not always recognised, etc… plus it’s yet another application to use for finding and listening to my music, and I think we need fewer apps not more!

there is or used to be a WD portable hard drive (battery powered) that also had a wifi network, so you could load 2 TB of music up, turn it on and connect your phone to it as its own portable network, worked like a dream for me on road trips.

For starters, I would be very happy with just having Roon work as a portable front end for Tidal, with (if available) Tidal versions of my music, both from my music server and imported from Tidal.
I am currently on vacation, and after having having Tidal start autoplay ‘recommended tracks’ ( very much not music I wanted at the time) after the two tracks I had started to play, I realized how bad their app is.
If the app could be set to the flac or lossy depending on wi-fi or mobile network, and also offline play (with a set limit for libarary size/storage) it would be perfect for my use.

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Why not set up a VPN between houses? It’s really easy to set up these days comparitively. Then Voila, your server is on your Dad’s network. As long as his music and yours are put into the scanning locations you’re done. If you’re on a slower internet connection then just put his music at your end and he can keep a copy that you can sync up every now and then. Uses more storage but it would work and it would work today.

One thing I’ve been really hoping for is a complete music playing solution so that regardless of how my music is played data like playlists, play count, ratings, last played, etc can all be synced into a single library. With the upcoming integration with Sonos Roon has taken another step toward this total solution for me. All that’s left is to create a mobile player app.

So is this in the works??? Pretty please??!!

Probably somewhere between ‘on the roadmap’ and ‘in the works’… is my hunch anyway.

See these posts:

My suggestion here is let’s not try to boil the ocean. I personally would love as a first step just being able to copy songs to my phone and have the data (play count, last played, rating, etc) sync back to my main library.

In terms of actually accessing the library remotely outside of the home network, perhaps look at Subsonic. I’ve been using it for years. The Dsub app for Android is awesome and allows playback over the network or from local storage.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: iPad as a Roon audio endpoint?

I am currently trying it out for 14 days and was a bit disappointed that this hasn’t been implemented yet. For me it’s essential and I hope it’s coming. I don’t envision myself buying this product in it’s current form, but if I was able to browse my library and listen to it on my phone while taking the bus to work, and then connect to my library when I am at work it would be amazing.

It’s absolutely coming, but it’s a big project so we don’t have a firm timeline to share on when.

I will mention that lifetime members get free updates for life, so if you like Roon in its current form no reason to wait :wink:

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Why not move the whole thing into the Cloud :grinning:

No need of a local PC, local storage, just local controllers and endpoints. Just like Tidal or any other similar service. I suppose that’s the future.

Jottacloud maybe ? One of the cheapest if not cheapest services available. And Donald can’t touch :ghost: