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.
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?
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.
Agree that Roon probably won’t do this. Especially on a Nucleus.Which is a bit disappointing as AirPlay (and casting in general) is just so ridiculously convenient. Especially for my partner who just wants to point her phone at whatever device she wants and play her Apple Music library. That’s often how I do it rather than breaking out Roon. However my solution is to run Debian on an Intel NUC (rather than ROCK) and run Roon Server and then install shairport-sync separately and play through a USB DAC attached to the NUC. Both Roon server and shairport work nicely with each other and give up the Alsa interface once playing stops. Roon Ready Relay looks like a protocol for new certified hardware devices to take non-networked sources such as CD or turntable and pipe them into Roon just like a streaming source/local file. Maybe one of these new devices could accept Airplay/Chromecast/Spotify Connect/Tidal Connect etc and pipe it to Roon? Seems at bit of a stretch when it could all be done in software though.