Context
I mainly listen to music in my living room, where I also watch TV or play some games. Audio is always played through my Denon AVR, and for convenience I’ve been using a Logitech Harmony for at least 10 years. Well, three different models that is.
So far, playing music via Roon required me to use both the remote control as well as the Roon App: first I had to start the “Listen to Music” activity on my Harmony, then I could press the play button in Roon (actually, the order is not relevant here). Worse, when stopping the music or turning off everything via the remote, I often forgot to do the other step, which either left the music playing or the receiver powered on for the rest of the day.
And that’s where the Source Control extension comes into play…
Controlling Harmony Activities via Roon
I just finished the initial version of Source Control extension for Logitech Harmony. It works by connecting to the Harmony Hub (so it needs to be a rather new Harmony, I guess), then exposing each of the configured activities as one Source Control item. In my case, this results in entries for “Watch TV”, “Play Games”, and “Listen to Music”.
The Source Control extensions can then be bound to an output device - in my case an RPi - which will have the following effect:
- If the activity is not activated when starting output to the device, the extension will tell Harmony to switch to that activity.
- If you are using the Harmony remote control to turn off everything, Roon will stop playback.
- Last but not least, when bringing up the volume control UI, there is a button to turn off the activity from within Roon.
With that: feel free to give it a try if you are also using a recent Logitech Harmony remote control. I am sure there will be some glitches, but overall things seem to be running rather smoothly.
What’s next?
The extension does not provide a way to control the volume. For me, this is on purpose because Harmony only supports relative volume adjustments. I am currently working on Volume Control extension for Denon/Marantz AVRs, which will allow for absolute volume control, which I find much more convenient. Roughly, it’s working but it needs some more tweaking…