Roon as an output channel for other sources? Ugh, but maybe

Danny’s comments about the Input device are on point…

From a product standpoint, I want what you’re suggesting, and also more.

There are some technical questions about how to handle latency and video sync. RAAT does do a fair amount of buffering. These aren’t an issue for radio or phonograph sources, but for computer audio or TV’s, it’s more difficult. So is emulating sound cards in a way that is convincing to a wide range of mainstream apps.

There are some really interesting product possibilities that come from supporting mixing in addition to custom input options.

For example, for a desktop/office endpoint product, I really want 2 inputs and 2 outputs:

Inputs:

  • Computer/notification sounds/youtube
  • Music

Outputs

  • Speakers
  • Headphones

I’m not sure this product needs output matrix functionality (i.e. using speakers + headphones at the same time), but I definitely want to hear both notification sounds and music at once. And I want the notification sounds to have no impact on SQ unless they are actually happening. The usual compromise is to use the “OS Mixer” and run the whole computer at one sample rate/configuration, and then normalize everything to that, which means you’re living in a degraded state 100% of the time just so you can hear skype ring a few times a day.

Slaving the notification sound parameters to the format configuration of the music would be an improvement, but the most elegant solutions only become possible when you start architecting hardware around them.

I have thought through another product that does want to use headphones + speakers at the same time for different streams: a bedside radio with integrated headphone amp. If I fall asleep listening to music in headphones and forget to turn it off, I still want the alarm to play through the speakers in the morning to wake me up, even if I left the system “switched” to the headphones zone the night before, and even if the headphones are still playing.

Complicated little problems that require end-to-end product design. The “input device” is a small step in the right direction, but the more flexible possibilities are (to me) more interesting.

(As a side note, everything in my office is plugged into a 16ch mixing board that drives a pair of powered near-field monitors. So everything comes out the same speakers with no switching hassles…but this isn’t a practical setup for most…it has sated my appetite for more polished solutions).

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Hmm, my first reaction was that I don’t want notification sounds, they come up only if you think of this gadget as a computer, I want to hide the computerness as much as possible. When I say feeding Spotify into Roon, I think of Spotify as an FM radio, not a computer app. But then you brought up the alarm clock. I see your point, but I would still encourage a simple feed solution first. I think it addresses many valuable scenarios. (One of my sons, the musician, is a happy Roon/FLAC/Tidal user, but my other son uses Spotify so I can’t even give him a Roon subscription to gradually seduce him over to the Light Side.)

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the way to solve the Spotify issue is to make the Roon “box” support Spotify Connect, and just use Roon to do audio transport.

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It would be great if it could act as an AirTunes end point too. Reduces the number of audio devices to support at each play out location.

JRiver offers a WDM option where it can be the default Windows output device for all browser audio. So it is doable.

Does anyone know if any of these ideas are going to hit 1.3?

I’m sitting hear listening to an album on Roon, but a few minutes ago I was streaming internet radio. In between, I really wanted to listen to some audio tracks which I could stream off a music site I was browsing on the web, but there seems no way at present that I could pipe that from my laptop to my floor speakers, without going back to a cord from my laptop to my Nad M51. I would love to be able to select my computer output in the same way that I can select an internet radio stream, from within the Roon remote on my MacBook Pro and have it sent to my Roon server (sonic transporter). Using Roon got me away from always having a cord trailing behind my MacBook Pro as I wandered the house…

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This would be useful for other automation notifications. I currently bypass roon and hit the hardware directly for audio output, but it would be nice to use roon to be able to pipe notifications to. Since I now have roon endpoints in all my rooms.

With this running on my computer, I create a URL link favorite in lms for my squeezeboxes to play (a PCM stream). Works well and plays anything coming from my computer. When I’m back home I’ll try to test by adding that URL as “an internet radio stream” in Roon and see if it works. Can’t think why it wouldn’t.

http://www.streamwhatyouhear.com

Can Roon present itself as a selectable audio device in order to connect third party media players and let these players surf on the Zone strategy of Roon?

For example, I have a desktop radio, an online TV streaming (I am ignorant of what is common around the globe, but on my pc/smartphone, I can stream all the TV channels that are available on the traditional TV). As a third example, I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema.

It would simply be very, very obvious to connect these audio stream to speakers via Roon zones.

It means Roon must present itself as a selectable audio device in the (e.g.) Windows control panel for audio playback.

This would be a very interesting feature and should be a further motivation for a Roon subscription, beyond the Roon/Tidal player.

Now that I have written this, I almost cannot wait to have it! :slight_smile:

Let me put it this way: I would gladly pay Roon an additional $50 one-time-fee for such a feature

I don’t think Roon will support this anytime soon. What protocol do you think Roon would need to use to do this? Look up DLNA and UPNP on the Roon forum for reasons why.

It can be done quite easily, you just need to program Roon with an input selector (one day of coding?) that overrides the normal Roon player when the user requests an external player to be activated.

This is all you need, because at the market there are several third party audio devices. I add a screenshot as example. When Roon can read “default device”, the problem is solved. The best product is the CABLE Input from VB.

As a next step, I assume Roon would like to make its own version, even if that is technically not necessary. These are HiFi virtual devices

I tend to get a little uneasy whenever someone who is obviously not intimately familiar with the code base and architecture of a piece of software claims that adding feature A or B should be easy and only take a little bit of effort and time.

That said: if you are convinced that adding this over four platforms (Win/Mac/Linux/Andoid), five protocols (RAAT, Airplay, Squeeze, Meridian and soon Sonos) and three interfaces (desktop, tablet, phone), taking into account design, development, UI, testing and QA just takes ‘one day of coding’ – by all means go ahead and develop a Roon of your own.

It shouldn’t take you more than a month and I’m sure you’d sell a ton.

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It was not meant as a job description, but as an indication of job volume to create specifically an audio input selector. I have done this in Java and the exact same code is working on all the suggested platforms. Code is small enough to be posted here in this reply. IOW, to capture a stream is very trivial.

Then to do “streaming management” in Roon and allow this stream to replace its own media player, I would assume it is quite possible.

Go for it!

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I won’t go into the discussion about if this is easy or not, but I would find this solution very helpful.

I would love to be able to install a ROON input device (or as part of the ROON software already installed) on any computer on my network and send the sound through my ROON server.

I use a laptop for DRC measurements. If I could route REW measurement signals through ROON with convolver, it would be much easier to measure the effects of DRC.

I would love if Roon could create a window audio output, I have imported my room correction in Roon from REW, but obviously only music played with Roon is affected. YouTube, other online music like Spotify, movies and so on does not benefit from the convolution done in Roon.

If Roon would create an audio device, and do all DSP and other magic in there before sending it to output, it would be easy to just set the Roon device as default output in Windows and everything played would benefit from Roon DSP.

I did room correction in REW, and imported the settings into Roon and it sounds excellent. But sometimes I play games or watch YouTube, and sometimes I use Spotify to listen to stuff that’s not available in Tidal, and then I run into problems: no room correction available.

It should be noted that I sit in a small room with concrete walls, so room correction makes an almost ridiculous difference. Listening without it is horror for both me and my neighbors :slight_smile:

If Roon could optionally create an audio endpoint, and do all DSP in there (similar to for example Dirac), then this problem would go away. Any plans for that, or some other way to solve the problems II have?

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I have a Roon endpoint as a raspberry PI I want to route my PC sound output via roon to this endpoint. e.g. if I am playing a game on my PC or streaming a video on the PC I want to send the audio stream to the device using Roon. I do not (for long an involved reasons) want to send the output via Toslink etc… but want to send via Ethernet to Roon.

I have no idea if this is possible but I suspect not, can anyone point me in the right direction.

Hi @Craig,

Not at the moment, I’ve moved your post into this feature request topic.

Occasionally I like to play something from Amazon through headphones connected to my Win10 Pro x64 system (where Roon itself runs). Is it possible to get the output to go to Roon and thence to my stereo system (since, I think, Amazon playback is MP3, it wouldn’t be the very highest quality of music, but it’d be nice)? I’ve established that I can use Roon to play into the headphones (when something else isn’t using them), but is it possible to send the output to Roon?

The headphones I question are described in Control Panel/Sound as “Realtek High Definition Audio.” The device driver is supplied by Realtek. In Roon’s Settings/Audio, the concerned device is described as “WASAPI,” and under Playback, Bit-Perfect Format Support applies (that is, in green) to 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 96 kHz and 192 kHz.

I think would require a sound driver for the roon app to be seen as an audio device in the OS