Just recently discovered Roon in my search for Sonos alternatives and Roon looks a lot more attractive to me but I have some questions. I have a lot of PC’s in my house so running a roon dedicated server is no issue there.
I have a htpc attached to my TV and home theater and a PC in my office/game room, can I use a PC to both play music out of it’s locally attached speakers and control the music?
And to build on that question can I also use my phone to change the music if I am not near either pc or does it have to be changed from the PC?
Also wondering, can you set up different users so say my wife can have something playing in our bedroom and then I can play something different on the back deck while cooking dinner?
I looked around here quite a bit and couldn’t find answers to these questions.
I have a few raspberry pi 3’s already so I’m thinking about adding hifiberry amp+ boards to them to add some “endpoints” (I think is the term) in some other rooms like our bedroom, bathroom and back deck areas, would that be the most cost effective way to do that? Don’t really have any knowledge on speaker’s though so not sure what I should pair with them but I have a lot of networking knowledge as I’m as sysadmin by day.
Minus your last paragraph, as I don’t know a thing about raspberry pi, the answers to your questions are all Yes, Yes, Yes!!
Choose one pc, most powerful I suppose and install Roon Core on it. If you wish to use that same pc to play and control music you also have to install a Roon Remote (in addition to the Core) on that pc. All the other pcs in your house, your phone (android, ios), you’ll install the Roon Remote. The Roon Remote can control any pc in your household. The remote can also play music locally (ios exception).
For your wife, you will add a different profile for her, easily done from the overview page.
Yes, you can set up multiple profiles for different users.
Yes, you can either use some kind of DAC hat for the Pi, or you can use an outboard USB DAC. There’s lots of info about using Raspberry Pi’s with Roon here.
Thanks for the link to the pi section, don’t know how I missed it. Would a RPI device be the cheapest endpoint solution? I tried looking through the partner’s list websites but all the stuff was really expensive