Roon Bridge on OS-X

pwright92 · August 28, 2016, 2:29pm

Is it possible to run Roon Bridge on a Mac and also Roon? I would like to have the service running regardless of whether or not I am using the Mac. It’s a multi-user machine and running Bridge as a service not tied to a user account would be great.

pl_svn · August 28, 2016, 2:46pm

all that Bridge does is make the computer it is running on a Roon endpoint (for Roon Core or Server running on another machine)
it doesn’t watch/manage you music collection

Carl · August 28, 2016, 2:56pm

I suspect Peter means RoonServer, which does run the Roon core.

pwright92 · August 28, 2016, 2:58pm

Nope, I want to run Roon Bridge to drive the DAC separately from the Roon client used to browse the server. My server is running on Linux on a separate machine.

Carl · August 28, 2016, 3:03pm

I see.

I don’t know the answer to that. I would just install and run RoonBridge (without Roon running in the first instance) and try it. It may well be that Roon is smart enough to detect that A RAAT server is already running and then not startup its own RAAT processes.

Let us know how you get on.

pwright92 · August 28, 2016, 3:18pm

No, if I try running both, I don’t see Roon Bridge on the computer…

Carl · August 28, 2016, 5:03pm

It sounds like there is a clash, it was worth an experiment … I don’t think it was foreseen to ever run RoonBridge and Roon on the same machine.

I’ll leave a flag @Brian and @Danny to see if they have any comments… Maybe this needs to become a feature request.

pwright92 · August 28, 2016, 5:43pm

Thanks, it would be nice to have the USB connection independent from the user account.

danny · August 28, 2016, 7:49pm

Both Roon Bridge and Roon will start a RAATServer to deal with audio stuff.

Before starting a RAATServer, they will try to connect to an existing RAATServer. If that connection fails, a RAATServer will be spun up. If no Roon or Roon Bridge is connected to the RAATServer, it exits after a short time.

If you want force the RAATServer to be Roon Bridge’s process (due to user permissions or process hierarchy), then you must start it first. In normal cases, it shouldn’t really matter since they both kinda just hand off to each other.

Carl · August 28, 2016, 10:29pm

Thanks for clarifying what I thought might be the case.

I wonder why Peter is seeing different?

Carl · August 28, 2016, 10:39pm

Hi Peter,

Can you try this On the Mac Mini:

Reboot
Confirm RoonBridge is running (if not start it)
From a different device run Roon (as a remote)
Select the Mac Mini (RAAT) zone
Play a track

Then:

On the Mac Mini Start Roon
Does this affect the audio be ending played?
On the Mac Mini Stop Roon
Does this affect the audio be ending played?
Switch OSX user
Does this affect the audio be ending played?

See how you get on with that.

pwright92 · August 29, 2016, 8:16pm

So, when I start RoonBridge, all is good. Opening and closing Roon has no affect. But when I switch users, the sound cuts out until I switch users back. Is there a way to run RoonBridge as a daemon or service?

danny · August 30, 2016, 1:08am

yah of course… just normal unix stuff… sudo will let you run as another user and setsid will let you run in a matter that wont get killed on SIGHUP when your process group is killed on logout.

pwright92 · August 30, 2016, 2:39am

What would the command line start be? Just RoonBridge?

danny · August 31, 2016, 3:55pm

I haven’t tried any of this, so the details might be a bit off:

Roon Bridge is an app bundle, so it’s startup binary is here: /Applications/RoonBridge.app/Contents/MacOS/RoonBridge

sudo is sudo, I assume you know how to use it.

setsid seems to be missing from OSX If you use homebrew, you can brew tap nerdrew/homebrew-tap and then brew install setsid

Your final commandline would be something like

sudo -u user setsid /Applications/RoonBridge.app/Contents/MacOS/RoonBridge`

obviously you’d want to background, but I don’t know how you’ve started all this up.

This is not so bad, but requires some understanding of the UNIX parts of OS X. We’ve eliminated all this stuff if you use RoonBridge/Roon how we expected it to be used by most users. However, because this is UNIX, you should be able to pull off what you want.

pwright92 · August 31, 2016, 4:43pm

Thx, I’ll give it a try. Probably not til next week.

Timothy_Gold · January 31, 2017, 12:49pm

I’m new to Roon. I use an iPhone app as a remote. I would also like to be able to use my laptop as a remote. Roon core is on a music server. If I download RoonBridge to my laptop (a Mac) will I be able to use the laptop as a remote? Thanks.

wizardofoz · January 31, 2017, 12:58pm

Just use Roon (not Roon Sever or Roon Bridge) when it asks to setup as Control or Core select control and you should have a roon control endpoint on your mac

Timothy_Gold · January 31, 2017, 1:27pm

Thanks Paul

wizardofoz · February 1, 2017, 3:34am

Hope has you up and running…sometimes it’s hard to get ones head around what is what, with such flexibility comes some complexity

Maybe one day there will be a separate control only app for pc/mac like there is for portable phones and tablets…

For anyone else reading this…roon bridge needs to have run on startup checked IIRC to run automatically after a restart. So does server. Both only run in the menu bar (mac) or task bar (pc) and have no GUI

If you need a GUI or control on the pc/mac you can just install roon and select control then select the server (running on the same machine) and remember to close it afterwards to save some CPU utilisation.