Roon core on a smartphone

Hey

I wonder if it would be possible to run the roon core on a smartphone. For me it would be cool if I could run the roon core on a smartphone.

It seems to me that there are several advantages(?) :

  1. The device is really small and can fit everywhere.
  2. It has low power consumption.
  3. There is no fan.

The hardware requirements should be fulfilled. Though roon runs only on x64 not on arm.

So my question is if it is possible to run on a smartphone? And if so, is there any chance there will be such a version of the core?

Best
Christoph

Hi Christoph, I asked the same thing a while ago :slight_smile:

I have a good android DAP which I can load up to 1tb storage, so it’s very interesting to me.

If it were only possible to have a core (even if it’s stripped back to reduce CPU and memory load) on a mobile device it would really be great.

In addition, what would be even cooler would be to have Roon-Mobile, to access offline Tidal albums, thus making the whole experience even more complete.

The short answer is no, it is currently not possible. roon have stated that they are working on a version of roon that will be mobile but its exact nature and delivery timescale are unknown. Search the forum there are multiple posts about it.

Thanks for the answers. I searched the forum and I only found this.

To me it sounds more like a “yes” than a “no”…

Haha, Christoph, I was thinking exactly the same thing :slight_smile:

More like “Short answer is yes it’s possible, in a modified/stripped down form, but exact nature and timescale are unknown” :wink:

Let’s keep +ve!

Hmm, remember that Danny gave that answer three years ago, and while the hardware has improved, so have the demands placed upon it by Roon… And I see in the same thread there was the suggestion that Roon might support UPnp/DLNA, which has subsequently been resoundingly rejected as a direction for Roon.

Still, we know that Roon are working on delivering the Roon experience to mobiles outside of the home network, so something is brewing in Roon Labs.

From my perspective, an all singing all dancing “core” to operate on a phone is not needed. But some standalone Roon application which serves up seemless tidal experience and metadata, and can stream to bluetooth and chromecast would be a great compromise.

That sounds like the Core plus Bluetooth minus RAAT.

The seemingly obvious answer would be to give the iOS and Android apps the ability to operate independently of an active core, using files stored locally on them or streaming via a Roon streaming partner.

yep, that’s about the size of it :slight_smile: (maybe different for OP @Christoph_N ) For me personally the ability to seamlessly play Tidal alongside local content is one of the coolest features of Roon (i keep crawling back to Tidal over Qobuz for that reason alone).

To be able to do this on the go would be a game-changer. As I say, even better if it would be possible for the Roon-On-The-Go app to integrate with offline streamed content.

Maybe I am wrong, but I think my old smartphone has less than 1 W power when idle. The computer I use currently uses more than 20 W.

That is more than 20 times more energy consumption. Considering that the core should be up all time it would make quite a difference?

I would actually be more interested in a Roon home proxy and/or making VPN work so that I can use Roon on my phone from in my car or at work instead of either tidal app or a separate media player over VPN.

Latency issues would probably make the streaming difficult. I’d be very impressed if the Roon folks could make that work. Wouldn’t hold your breath, though.

Well I can reliably stream lossless FLAC from my NAS over VPN onto my iPhone in car using other software assuming the 4G signal strength isn’t terrible and player seems to buffer enough around small dead zones.

When at work, then iPhone is on wifi though 4g bandwidth these days is pretty decent TBH.
Now that Alexa voice is apparently working from the iPhone app, I’m kind of interested in getting some alexa based control going in-car as well (starting to work on alexa voice for roon and other stuff - just starting with the SDK so will be a while before I know whats possible) :slight_smile:

My holy grail here is of course getting something like “Alexa ask my home to play escape by thrillseekers” working while in car and a lot of pieces need to fall into place - outside access to my roon server being one of them,

My request may be related but not exactly the same. I like having my music with me wherever I go, not possiblein lossless form, but this does not matter so much if away from home I am playing back on little speakers. What I do now is import my livrary into iTunes, and have iTuned put a dumbed down 132 kbps version of my library onto the phone. I then play this back using the Music app or another app like Picky.

It would be so much nicer to have Roon’s much superior handling of the library for searching, discovery, playing individual classical compositions and all the rest of the features I love in Roon. It could be as simple as having a Roon app designed to handle the iTunes library (and this might have a very wide audience).

Yes - that’s what I want really. I don’t care so much about pristine lossless when away from home. I just want access to my home roon environment from my iphone wherever I am.