Roon on the go - make it work on the road!

You’ve made me curious to give it a try! Maybe this weekend…

You might be pleasantly surprised!

I think that there are actually three levels of portability for Roon, and having the ability to have access to one’s entire library remotely is really the highest level. There are two lower levels that (I think or at least hope) Roon could easily implement that would be a big step forward even if it doesn’t mean full remote library access.

The first is the ability to seamlessly use Roon as one’s sole music library manager for whatever local files are available even if one doesn’t have access to the Core. You could sort of do this if you had the Core on your laptop. You could have your local files and your main library on a NAS and select both file stores for your library. If you removed the link to the NAS when you were away from home, you could still use Roon to manage your local and Tidal collections. Once I had the Core on a separate server, that stopped working of course. Even without Roon managing one’s local files, simply having access to the Roon program on the road would be a boon because you could add a Tital/Qobuz copy of an album where it exists and have pretty good functionality on the road. Even more beneficial would be having access to all of Roon’s content which I would love to have even if I couldn’t use it to play files. Roon is my go-to source for album reviews and band history and I’d love to have access to this remotely.

The second would be to have access to the Roon database of one’s collection even if one couldn’t play it. I can’t tell you how many times I come across music from some online seller while I’m on the road and I can’t remember if I already own it. It would be a real personal boon to have live access to the data about my library even if I couldn’t play it.

Until Roon does mobile Plex lifetime seemed like the best/easiest option for me. There’s so much great high quality music content available as BluRay that it’s worth it for the video server side and plexamp does a great job of allowing off site access or downloads to the device for mobile use.

I wouldn’t consider Plex alone for household music use though. It’s not really configured for it and there’s really no metadata service to speak of, unless of course you need your software to get covers and track names. There’s also none of the end point control which makes Roon such a pleasure to use.

It doesnt. Otherwise I woold maybe not be around here anymore.

Sad trombone…

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Roon have always said a mobile solution is in their plans, but have never announced any timeframe. There are threads on the Forum about using VPN. Just search for VPN and you’ll find them. It works for those who have ISPs that provide healthy upload capacity from the home Core.

It’s tolerably clear that Roon don’t see VPN as a viable mobile solution, otherwise I’d expect it to have been done by now. I can understand such view. Having to effectively support home networks is problematic enough, without delving into VPN.

The latest I can see Roon implementing a mobile solution is when Cloud capacity and download bandwidth permits running the Core in the Cloud probably along with with Cloud storage of “local” files. Australia and regional USA is a long way away from that. South Korea and New Zealand could be there.

Noticed today that Roon 1.7 build 571 works with plain jane Wireguard VPN. Works via wifi, works via LTE. For me, this is close enough to a mobile solution!

Was there anything peculiar you had to do to support Roon via strongswan? I have basically everything working, including SMB shares and LMS to iPeng, with an iPhone. The iOS Roon remote refuses to see Roon server.

Honestly I don’t know. I did network / VPN configuration long time before I discovered Roon. And then Roon over VPN just worked.
If you can access your SMB shares from VPN network (using static IPs) then router is routing between both networks which is good.
So it seems that in your case Roon is not discovered.
Start with keywords like:

  • multicast routing
  • IGMP
  • proxy ARP

I’ve gotten this far, but I’m by no means a network engineer. Are you using OpenWRT, by any chance? I enabled IGMP snooping and installed igmpproxy, to no effect.

No I don’t. Sorry I cannot help :frowning:

Plex and plexamp and your home Server is with you.

Honestly roon has many advantages, but communication about developement Roadmap is Not one of them.

I use roon AT home and plex on the go. Unfortunatey the only reasonable solution.

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This has been my landing point too. The problem I have is playlists. Especially since export playlists is broken in my NUC/mac remotes setup.

After purchasing Roon for a year I realized that I consume music primarily on the go. Just throwing in a + 1 for the ability to use roon in a car. I may cancel and wait for this update as I don’t use the service nearly as much as I though I would.

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I luv Roon and all of its awesome features… Yada Yada.
So what would be my “Roon Lite” or “Roon on the Road” feature request?

Hopefully it’s a simpler request than trying to make Full Blown Roon work away from a core.

All I would like is just a separate app that I can open on my phone and play a playlist or two that I’ve created in normal Roon. I could copy the onto the new “Roon to Go” app. Upon opening it at a remote location (such as a friends house), it would pull over WiFi via Tidal (or Qobuz) the awesome songs that I’ve added to the given playlist.

If something like this is more achievable, it would really be nice to offer my music at a party (once we can attend parties again :joy:).

JD

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Hi!

Did there anything happen in the meantime? This feature would be interesting for me too.

Thanks!

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