A wireless remote control that can do more than just control the volume (like rooDial with the Microsoft Surface Dial) has been on my (and probably your) wish list for a long time.
Saw it, bought it and developed the Roon Extension rooMax. With rooMax you can use this beautiful device to operate Roon almost completely.
In addition to Volume Control and a button for Play/Pause/Standby, Quick Keys offers eight additional buttons that can be assigned to specific Control-Sets. rooMax allows you to freely configure all buttons and assign them to a variety of Roon functions. You can find more details on the rooMax product page.
A highlight is the availability of Web-Hooks. This allows you to trigger functions in an existing home automation system at the touch of a button. This means that the functionality of rooMax goes far beyond the operation of Roon!
The entire rooMax project was very complex, hence the relatively high price of rooMax compared to my other Roon extensions. In the last few weeks, twelve volunteers have helped me to beta-test rooMax in detail. They also brought in many ideas, which I was able to implement almost all of, much to their delight. THANK YOU ALL BETA-TESTERS
In my YouTube Playlist you now can find a Video about rooMax showing what it is and how to configure it in Roon.
Just to give you some hints where to find information regarding how to setup and use rooMax:
This afternoon my son will visit me and record some video snippets. The whole demonstration video should be available in the middle of next week in my YouTube channel.
I am playing with this gadget for some days now. The Quick Keys Controller together with RooMax is the perfect way to control roon. With this device, I can toggle my roon ready device on/standby. I can choose radio stations or playlists, regulate the volume an much more. You definitely should watch the video from @DrCWO.
And Web-Hooks should allow you to trigger functions in an existing home automation system at the touch of a button, but only if you know how to set and use webhooks (I don’t).
The headline of this forum thread might seem a bit over the top, but IMHO it is justified. I used a Space Mouse with roo6D for a long time. It’s a very good device, but I’ve found the Quick Keys to be far superior. There can always be disagreement among people over what’s “best”, of course. But in any case, the Quick Keys is a giant step up in functionality from other controller knobs. With its screen and multiple buttons, it can truly act as a tiny version of the Roon app. The rooMax extension really brings the hardware to life by offering extensive functionality and customizability.
Roon has always helped me to enjoy music more, and now this new hardware + software combo has made that even easier and more fun. I used to wish the Roon Mac app had a mini-player view, like I remember the iTunes app did. This thing is just like that, but in the form of a nice little object that feels good to use. Thanks for all the hard work on this, @DrCWO.
I have a playlist questions:
I can’t find all my playlists in the extesion interface. Is there a set number it can show? Playlist folder navigation would be nice if you have a lot af playlists.
I also have the RooNumio extension activated and it seems to show the same playlists available as in the RooMax extension but in another order (not alphabetical).
None of the extensions shows all the playlists that the Roon side menu does.
This is it. I counted and I can see 100🙂
It would be good to have an option to go above 100 or at least change to sorting to “last modified”. Right now I can’t add new playlists without deleting old ones.
Yes have a lot of playlists
I use them for a lot of different things. But what I’m trying to do with the Quic Keys is to have buttons for albums that I listen to often or new albums. So I make a pool of playslists with one album per playlist. Then I can change buttons around relatively quickly without having to make new playlists. But it seems I hit the 100 count ceiling pretty quickly with this method. Maybe there is another way to do this?
I already have most of the playlists sorted in folders. It doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the ones showed in the extension interface.
Would it be possible to add a setting to remove the limitation on 100 lists shown in the GUI? (of course with a: “not recomended” warning
A more flexible solution here is to use rooMax’ Webhooks functionality combined with RoonCommand. Running a webhooks server that calls RoonCommand directly via shell commands allows you to basically find and play anything in Roon – and tie it to a button in rooMax. I currently use BetterTouchTool on a Mac to serve up the webhooks, but webhook is a free, fine and lightweight alternative.
Discussing this further may be a bit out of scope for this rooMax support thread, but feel free to open up a new one if you have any questions,
