A lot of people must be in, or go through the transition from owning a lot of CD’s towards streaming/Roon. The CD rip function is cool in the nucleus, just attach a regular CD drive to the USB, pop in the CD and after it’s done ripping, the total album is stored in your Library.
Since ripping take a significant time and maybe I don’t want to convert all my CD’s (yet), it would be great if the Nucleus + normal simple CD drive to USB could function as a CD player. Pop in the CD, press play. Since the DA conversion is done via the DAC attached, then the nucleus basically only has to “feed through” to the DAC as usual. The additional function needed would be the control, play/pauze/forward/back/next/previous and for this a remote receiver to the nucleus (or the remote of the DAC) could make this happen.
All this would make it possible to get rid of the bulky CD player, have a drive that is used for ripping as well as playing CD’s
There are a couple of requests for this feature, nothing yet though. I would just start slowly ripping your collection, perhaps as you want to listen to an album, rip and import it. While Roons built in rip function is handy, I would NOT recommend using it as the resulting metadata is only understood by Roon. IMO, it’s better to use an external program such as DBpoweramp.
That’s… unfortunate. One semi-elegant way to implement what @Arno_Pfennings is suggesting would’ve been a rather simple toggle to start playing during the rip - rip track one, start playing it, and by the time that, and maybe the next one, are done playing, your album is going to pretty much be imported. Extra bonus, that way, by the end of the year, you can get rid of your CD library, because you know that the ones that aren’t ripped weren’t bringing you happiness anyway.
There has been a hack that allows CD playback through Roon using a MicroRendu or similar. That and the Pi based solution someone else has introduced here are amongst the only real options.
Also HQPlayer users can use that to play CD’s bypassing Roon.
My collection isn’t huge but when I started I used Tidal to fill in any gaps and removed the Tidal titles once I ripped the disc.
(IIRC, some of the higher-end audiophile CD players used computer transports at one point, and used the higher read speeds to do multiple passes, CD Paranoia / EAC style. Same thing with portable players, I have fond memories of a Sony device of the sort that’d downsample to an audible degree…)
The entertainment system would (optionally) rip a cd to hard drive, and retrieve metadata and artwork. Sometimes it even got it right. It would start playing during the rip. The novelty soon wore off. I mostly just listened to Radio 3.
You can get a cd player function into Roon from a usb CD drive plugged into a raspberry pi using Extension Manager and installing Entry Points developed by @Jan_Koudijs
