It just occurred to me that although using my phone, laptop or tablet to control Roon is hands down my favourite method to control playback I feel that very device can take away from the experience somewhat. All my devices receive notifications, emails and texts etc and these are distractions.
I would love you to come up with a premium remote control for Roon. This ideally would be in a tablet like format completely stripped back and would only run the Roon control software (like nucleus). I take my phone out with me etc but the remote can remain in the living room where it can be picked up and used by all.
I may be the only one who wants it but worth asking.
I see your point about the distractions, but I remember that the Roon team’s origin is in Sooloos, where they had to build their own hardware because nothing else was available. It was very cool originally, but it rapidly became obsolete, big and clunky and unresponsive and expensive — ooh, was it expensive. (I still have one in the basement, if you are interested.)
The mainstream manufacturers have huge development budgets and low manufacturing costs, because of volume. Nobody else can compete.
But the idea is good. I think we can define a software configuration on top of mainstream hardware. I would suggest getting a minimalistic iPad, registering it with another user name, not your regular one, so no mail or text or other stuff will know about it. No distractions will arrive. Uninstall everything else, and just install Roon. (An Android device of course works too, and is cheaper, I don’t know much about them.)
The Tidal connection is not a problem, because it is from the Core, not the remote.
Just remember not to use it to communicate with the Forum! Once you open the door to the Internet, stuff will begin to leak in.
I am very confident apple will never allow that but some hardware manufacturers such as, HTC, Samsung or Sony for example would entertain the idea. Roon slaps it’s branding on and uses the exact same amazing app for mobile/tablet we are used to that they are already developing and has the tablet boot straight into it.
It stays at home, no distractions and can be enjoyed by everyone.
If you want to run ONLY the Roon app on an iPad then you could use Guided Access (part of Accessibility settings). This would mean that users could not access any other apps without entering a 4 digit code.
I would still need to have it connected to an iTunes account to manage updates and download apps. DAPs exist while we have phones, cameras still exist while we have phones and so do remotes.
It would be nice to have a dedicated remote. I’m very tech savy and know there is tons of ways to imitate what I’m looking for but if the nucleus can exist then so can dedicated remote control hardware.
I have a couple of stripped-down iPads that I use for this very purpose. They aren’t logged into any accounts aside from the App Store and have all notifications turned off. The only apps loaded have to do with remote control in one way or another.
Read up on the Guided Access function in iOS. This allows you to lock an app to the screen and completely bypasses the need to unlock the device if it’s asleep. Roon still needs to reconnect, but that’s pretty quick these days.
I’ve also used Guided Access on my personal iPad and it has the side benefit of disabling all notifications as well. The feature was primarily designed to allow you to hand your iPad to your child to use a single app or watch a video without messing anything up on the iPad.
I do a very similar thing with a Surface Pro tablet running Windows 10 with all notifications disabled and the lock screen just set to swipe. It works pretty well as a dedicated controller in tablet mode, Roon in fullscreen and with the mouse hidden.
It has the added advantage of being able to access all the DSP, export and so on which isn’t yet available in the iOS app.
I absolutely love the surface pro but cant justify the price just for a standalone remote device. I would use it as my everyday windows device if I don’t spend a bomb on laptop not so long ago.
The SPRO is a little costly, I was lucky in that I got mine through work.
The Surface Go is certainly within the iPad price range, in the UK the base model is £379.99. Its 10" and only weighs 500g so with that and the ability to run the full Roon control application (although you would have switch it out of Windows 10 S mode) I think it would be perfect
And this is the problem and why Roon can’t ever compete in the tablet market, it would either be too expensive and not sell or Roon would take a massive loss on each unit sold.
It’s not terribly hard to set up an iPad to exclusively run a single app. With the config tools Apple makes, you can setup an iOS device to boot up and solely run a single item and not easily be able to quit it. I’ve done it with the Sonos app for my kiddos on an old iPod Touch. It requires adult intervention when an app upgrade comes out, but it isn’t that hard. I THINK you can do something similar with an Amazon Fire tablet which is cheaper, but offers a far inferior experience.
