I have a Bryston BDP-pi running Manic Moose and MPD. When I want it to become and endpoint I change the playback mode from m MPD to Roon Ready. I think it shuts down the MPD for this mode. What is actually happening internally here? Am I completely bypassing the Manic Moose and utilizing the Roon Bridge. What is actually going on behind the scenes when a player has its own playback capability but can become a roon endpoint? As apposed to a device that does not have its own playback capability and functions only as an endpoint.
Supporting the various music protocols usually requires quite a bit of software development. Software development is generally expensive, complicated and risky, so most companies wanting to produce a streamer will license the software for the protocols they want to support. That way they can depend one someone else’s development and testing.
Generally Roon will either be Roon bridge as supplied by roon unchanged, or something written using Roon’s SDK and libraries. In either case most of the code will be from roon.
So Manic Moose is likely similar to Ropiee, or Hi Fi Berry OS, where the developer will integrate the OS, the software stacks they want to support, and provide a suitable GUI to allow you to control it.
I think it’s likely Manic Moose uses third party code for most of their MPD and Roon support, but make sure it works with the Bryson board (which itself was a licensed and upgraded Hi Fi Berry DAC+).