Hi all,
Today, we’re excited to announce built-in support for Devialet AIR in Roon!
Devialet AIR
Starting with today’s release, anyone with a Devialet Expert or Expert Pro system (all the way back to the very earliest models) can stream high-resolution audio using Devialet AIR technology directly from Roon, without a using Devialet’s AIR driver!
As always, Signal Path makes clear exactly what’s happening to the audio stream, and Roon will also allow you to adjust volume, and power down your Expert system. And when you start playback in Roon, your Expert system turns on and selects the appropriate input automatically. Note that your Devialet device will need to be connected using its ethernet port in order for DSD64 content to play natively.
See our blog post about AIR support here: http://blog.roonlabs.com/roon-devialet/
MQA Detection
This release also includes improved detection of MQA files. Up until now, we relied on file tags to identify MQA content, which was susceptible to incorrectly tagged files, and didn’t work with TIDAL streams. Starting with Build 242 MQA content will be identified by looking at the audio stream itself.
First, and most importantly, this means that we can now relay information about MQA streams to Roon Ready devices, which will enable partners to begin making MQA + RAAT work together.
Secondly, we can now sniff for MQA during audio analysis. This means that Roon can now identify improperly tagged MQA files as MQA and determine the original Sample Rate. While we’re not going to automatically re-analyze every track in every library, you can manually re-analyze any tracks in your library that might have been missed previously due to improper file tagging.
Finally, Roon will now detect MQA during playback and display it in Signal Path. This works for TIDAL content as well as local files, meaning you’ll be able to tell if a track is MQA and see its original sample rate by looking at the signal path in Roon, just as you would on an MQA-capable DAC like Mytek’s Brooklyn.
Other Changes
This release also contains a change to our default stereo/mono playback behavior when talking to multi-channel devices. Previously, the full channel layout was always sent, with silence sent to unused channels. Now, stereo/mono content is sent using the “2.0” layout, and only multi-channel content uses the selected layout. There is a new setting that allows users to revert to the old behavior if desired, but we expect that the new default will work for the great majority of use cases.
We’ve also made some changes to our implementation of Airplay’s new security model, so entering passwords should be required less often in some cases.
A number of other bugs were also fixed over the last few weeks, and the full list of changes is below.
That should do it for this release. Thanks everyone!
The Team at Roon Labs
Roon 1.3 (Build 242) Release Notes
Roon Build 242is now rolling out for OSX, Windows, Windows (64 Bit), and Linux. Updated versions of Roon for Android and iOS have been submitted to their respective App Stores and will be available upon approval.
Build 102 of Roon Bridge is also live for all platforms.
All platforms and apps should update automatically.
New Functionality for Build 242:
- Devialet AIR streams natively from Roon
- DSD64 playback requires ethernet
- Improved detection of MQA content.
- MQA files that are not tagged properly with an ENCODER/ENCODEDBY tag will be recognized by “sniffing” the audio content during audio analysis.
- During playback, MQA streams (including TIDAL) will be noted in Signal Path based on the same “sniffing”
- As of this build, Roon will begin sending information about MQA streams via the RAAT protocol to Roon Ready endpoints–enabling Roon Ready partners to complete their support for using RAAT + MQA together.
- The RAAT SDK version is now displayed on the Device Info screen
- Multi-channel playback now supports playing stereo content to the device in 2ch mode, while handling multi-channel content using the selected stereo layout. There is an setting to restore the old behavior.
Changes for Build 242:
- Airplay changes to minimize how often you need to enter passcode when using devices that support “new style” AirPlay authentication.
- The Sonos Playbar properly drops out of group when TV signal applied
- Fixed a rare race condition related to RAAT communication/connection management
- Fix for TIDAL album covers mysteriously disappearing after metadata updates.
- Added support for cdparanoia’s default file naming scheme when grouping tracks into albums.
- Fix a bug that prevented 7.1 content from playing with the 5.1 layout selected under some circumstances.
- Fixed a bug that caused us to miss filesystem change notifications when a case sensitive drive was visible to a Mac with a case-insensitive HFS+ filesystem
- Fixed a bug that prevented certain huge image files from being recognized.
- Internet radio stations that use https:// urls should work as expected (For example, WNYC).
- Improved composition/part extraction from track titles in many cases
- Fixed a bug that caused exports to fail when the exported file path is extremely long.
- Fixed a crash when analyzing certain malformed AAC/ALAC files.
- Fixed a bug that prevented multiple-track-editing of “recording end date” in some situations.
- Fixed a memory leak in the playback subsystem.
- The QNAP Recycle bin is now automatically ignored when scanning for content.
- Several stability improvements related to Sonos streaming.
- Fixed a bug that caused some incorrect tracks to be displayed when using “View All Tracks” on a tag that contained an artist.