Roon Core playing away

Can Roon be installed on my work PC and operate like Roon Arc does on my phone i.e. feeding from my core at home?

First, welcome!

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: Maybe. Requires a VPN and some level of networking mastery. You can try it if your work PC will let you establish a VPN to your home network and see if that’s enough (since you’ll be streaming off the remote as an endpoint, there isn’t discovery). If you decide you want to stream to a different endpoint on the same network that your work PC is on, then you have to figure out how to make UDP broadcast packets traverse subnets and a site-to-site tunnel. And if you do that, I need all the details because many have said this is easy, I can’t find any proof of it existing in the real world. Many threads on this, feel free to ask questions and we can point you to it. Good starting place pasted below. But if the above is gibberish to you or the thread below is gibberish to you, then the short answer applies. It’s not supported behavior at all.

EDIT: I should say that in most cases I’ve heard of, just VPN’ing in (using Tailscale or OpenVPN or Wireguard) from an iPhone or computer isn’t enough. You can see your core, and you can play from that core to whatever zones it can normally see. Typically your core cannot see the computer / iPhone / iPad which you are using as a remote - because it can’t respond to UDP broadcast packets it isn’t receiving because they don’t make it through the tunnel. So you still need to set up udp-proxy-2020 on your router.

DOUBLE EDIT: I think, however, that if you can install Tailscale (or another VPN) on your core, then it works. So if you have a windows, mac, or linux core or you’re running in docker on a NAS, you might get this to work. Again, here I’m definitely not an expert, but I think that this just might work because if you have a direct connection then the UDP broadcast isn’t making a hop pre-tunnel or something like that. Again, here i’m way way way over my skis just don’t want to inadvertently spread disinformation.

Just a note, I believe this VPN solution would be with Roon Remote not ARC, correct?

Yes. ARC will be fine (unless you have some crazy lockdown firewall at work).

On a related note, you know what would be really cool? If, while playing music on my internal network through Roon, I decide to leave the house and it pauses Roon and then automatically picks ups where it left off whenI turn on ARC in the car.

This happened the other day. Especially for classical where you’re in the middle of a long movement and you want to keep going and not have to try to find where you were in the movement on ARC

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There are several open feature suggestions for a desktop app of ARC, maybe you want to add your vote to the one that already has the most,

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