My Roon Core is a Mac Mini and it’s in my main home theater room. HDMI connected to the TV and optical out (via HDMI splitter, long story) to my home theater receiver. I originally was using simple HDMI to the receiver but the audio would cut out for a second a few times each song and for some reason, using optical fixed it… anyhow, not the point of this post.
I love the display on the big TV when I’m listening to music. It’s actually what got me to go from Volumio to Roon. What I didn’t like was needing to use the wireless keyboard to change the display. I was using my iPhone as a remote to control the playlist and FFWD/REW/PAUSE/PLAY/ETC… and the Harmony remote just chose the source and did volume up and down… but today decided to try to get my Harmony remote to control these basic transport features too.
I originally pulled out my FLIRC (since the newer Mac Mini computers don’t have IR like the older models) but was pleasantly surprised to see the Harmony Companion bluetooth pair to my Mac Mini as a keyboard. So it instantly paired and does everything I want.
In addition to basic transport controls like play, pause and skip… the directional arrows give me the ability to change the display from lyrics, to artist photo, to album cover art, etc… and the up/down arrows scroll through the information on the screen. I love it.
I’m sure most of you knew this already but having all the features outside of picking new music from my library all on a simple Harmony handheld remote is awesome. Thanks Roon!