Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on a side project for a while and it’s finally ready to share. Roon: Toasted is a free, lightweight Windows app that pops up a now-playing toast whenever the track changes, can put album art and play controls right on your taskbar, and gives you a full player at the press of a hotkey, all without switching to the full Roon app. I know there are already some great apps like this out there. I mainly built Toasted as a companion to Roon: Dialed Up, my Stream Deck plugin, so the two work together seamlessly, but it works just as well on its own.
Here’s what it does:
- Now-playing toasts: a small popup when the track changes, and you can pick the corner, monitor and how long it stays up
- Taskbar widget (experimental): shows the art and play controls right on your taskbar
- The Toaster: a player window you pull up with a hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+Z by default), with Playing, Queue, Browse and Search tabs, a zone picker, and volume controls
- Quick search: a second hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+S) opens it straight into search, ready to type
- Album art colors: optional, the app picks up the colors of whatever’s playing
- Hearts and library (experimental): heart the playing track, or add it to your library as a single song or the whole album
- Updates itself: new versions show up through the built-in updater, no re-downloading needed
- It sits in the tray, can auto-start with Windows, and finds your Core on its own. Just enable it under Settings > Extensions the first time, like any other extension. If it can’t find your Core, there’s a Search again button and a manual IP/port field
Download: Releases · Vulkandr/roon-toasted · GitHub
I’m also putting together a website soon, and the downloads will be available there too once it’s up.
Stream Deck users: Roon: Dialed Up has two buttons that open the Toaster, either as a player or straight into search. More on the plugin in its own post: Roon: Dialed Up, a Stream Deck plugin for Roon
A few things to know:
- Windows only for now (tested on Windows 11)
- It isn’t code signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn you the first time you run the installer
- Roon’s extension API has its limits, so there’s no signal path or audio quality info, and the queue can’t be reordered
- The experimental features use parts of Roon that aren’t officially supported, so they could stop working after a Roon update. If they do, they hide themselves rather than break anything
For developers: the hearts and library features come from roon-library-controls, a small open-source TypeScript package (MIT) I made so other Roon apps can heart tracks and add to the library too: GitHub - Vulkandr/roon-library-controls · GitHub. Toasted runs its own Rust version of the same code, so if you want to see what it can do before using it, Toasted is the easiest way to see it in action.
It’s still early days, so there are plenty more updates to come. Feedback, bug reports and feature ideas are all welcome, here or on GitHub, no matter how small. Hope some of you find it useful!