Roon as an Airplay device?

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

(See Can Roon be used as a Airplay device? - #2 by paaj)
Because it is not a feature suggestion, so I take it up again in this section.

It would be great if Roon could act as a Airplay receiver and forward / stream the content to all my loudspeakers / roon endpoints…

I understand that Roon is a audio manager not an audio endpoint.
BUT there are use cases it would be great! Considering Roon as audio manager (certainly not as library manager).
For example I often listen to Podcasts. It would be great when I could stream a Podcast via Airplay to Roon. And Roon just forwards the audio stream to my different endpoints in my house, all set-up and grouped in Roon. Currently I have to hassle around connecting my different endpoints manual via airplay to my iPhone. It works, but just “pushing” the airplay stream to Roon would be much much easier.

2

Take a look here -

WIll require a bit of tinkering, but it works

3

This will do that.

4

I’ve been googling to see how this can be done and not come up with any better.

With Roon being able to to distribute audio out (now with ARC as well) it does strike me as odd that you can cast/airplay/send music to the core. Mainly I would want for podcasts and being able to listen into zones, yes its do-able with lots of other devices but it ruins the elegance and if I can hardwire my Roon endpoints breaks the wired chain.

Has anyone seen any new solutions that could make it work?

5

I wonder if this will open the door to using Roon as an Airplay device.

This may turn out to be little more than a rebranding of this existing functionality, rather than anything new. But here’s hoping.

Ideally you wouldn’t need any external hardware and Roon could / would act natively as an Airplay endpoint itself within the core feature set / software.

But my guess is that Apple are funny about (end-user) software (as opposed to hardware) being certified as Airplay ‘devices’ and Roon are uneasy with implementing 3rd party Airplay libraries like shairport-sync or similar in Roon.

The downside is all the existing workarounds involve annoying delays or are too unstable for everyday use. I expect like many I just want a solution that works when I want to play some music, I don’t want to maintain a tech stack with external devices and additional software updates even if I technically can.