It would be much easier to choose and play selections than what I do now. While I can still put individual songs in a playlist, it’s tedious. Roon, is elegant, portable, and just easy.
I should say that the solution that I ended up with for 5.1 MCH through Roon still has me fiddling with the Windows sound properties on my bridge nearly every time. It’s the same process to select the Dolby Access (Playback, Configure, Audio Channels, Test), so I think that would remain as a motion to select the decoding at my (Windows Bridge / Onkyo) endpoint first. Once I get that set with 5.1, though, I’m good to go and Roon drives the listening experience.
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Over the years I’ve used Kodi on a PC, then Kodi on Nvidia Shield, then Roon Nucleus. By and large, I’ve always been really happy with how it’s handled 5.1 MCH for me mostly FLAC. For my physical discs, I’ve moved to a Kaleidescape M700 disc vault. I just found the disc ripping process too much of a hassle. For everything else, Atmos streaming on Apple is fine. This covers 90% of my listening now. Every now and then I fire up Kodi for something I either don’t have loaded into the Kaleidescape or other miscellaneous stuff… such as a few downloads that I bought from Steven Wilson’s Headphone Dust. I do really miss Roon though, and would be back in a heartbeat if they supported Atmos on Tidal (or, better yet, Apple Music). 
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