Roon player on Ubuntu 🤬

Roon Software Discussion
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In brief: i’m an ex IT professional, not much Unix (I was mostly occupied with IBM main/midrange) and some MS OS’s. Installed Ubuntu on HP i5 laptop - mainly as it’s no longer windows upgradeable so no support :roll_eyes:. It worked “OK” for a few months but after recent Chrome update Roon just won’t play any more. Sound otherwise ok, can watch Amazon YouTube etc fine. After spending quite some hours pulling my few remaining hairs out, I’ve ordered a new Mac Mini. The HP will go into the great industrial shredder in the sky. And I will install Roon on the Mac which just works… without the frustrations of Ubuntu let alone Windows. Here endeth the rant!

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Sorry to hear that!!

Roon should just work.

I will say, with nothing but good will, that the least issues you ever seem to hear (here) are from ROCK users, and after that from Linux users who don’t get too fancy. I have no glorified data so take this with huge amounts of salt. And I’ve run on Mac only briefly and it was totally fine. But especially after updates you hear people saying how rough it is.

Here is a thread:

Good luck whatever you do - we all want you to have minimum hassle, maximum listening enjoyment. But if it ever tempts you, the little gmktec n97 I mention in a thread there is still $136 on US Amazon and runs ROCK/MOCK silently & like a champ (for moderately sized library).

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I would skip the Mac and run roon Rock if I was you. Set and forgot, no OS updates to worry about.

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Thank you. I did not mention that my problem is limited solely to playback (Roon bridge on Ubuntu); I do run ROCK on an i5 NUC already and yes it is stable and hassle free :grinning:

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For what its worth, i have endpoints running DietPi and Roon bridge on them. They do not give me any issues whatsoever. Running on insignificant Dell micro computers. But they are strictly Bridges - nothing else.

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I concur, if you’re running just Roon Bridge, an RPi Zero 2 W running Ropieee or RooExtend or a Wyse Thin Client 3040 running a stripped down version of Linux is pretty much plenty and I’ve never had issues with either. If I was running a more substantial set of things, then it’s more like management of any other Linux box and there the headaches of “management” begin.

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Hi Nimmy,
I think the problem is that roonbridge needs an exclusive allocation of the audio device. You could test that by turning off pipewire/pulseaudio, e.g. with pavucontrol, systemctl restart roonbridge.

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I use squeezelite which integrates into the sound system of the linux desktop.

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Many thanks for the tip on pavucontrol. I installed it, tried configuring different outputs but sadly Roon Bridge still will not play. Tidal web player on Chrome still plays just fine, so my problem seems to be very specific to Roon Bridge. I’ve tried uninstalling Roon bridge and reinstalling, the same problem persists. Any more ideas please?

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  • Uninstall roon bridge
  • Install squeezelite, sudo systemctl --now disable squeezelite (don’t run as system daemon because we want to run it in the user session)
  • (as user) squeezelite -z
  • Enable squeezelite in Roon, et voilĂ  !

You can start squeezelite with systemd in your user session as shown above.

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Many thanks Nickpi, I migrated from Squeezeboxes (and Softsqueeze) to Roon when support ended for that good stuff, so I was pleased to try squeezelite on Ubuntu. Sadly to no avail and my unix skills (and patience) are limited… and I’ve wanted a Mac mini (for other reasons too) for a while :grinning: