But the ui isn’t geared for music, you don’t get the advanced metadata or feature set without PlexPass. It’s too basic without it.
You get way more metadata such as bios etc like Roon and more artwork choices with PlexPass. These all roll nicely into PlexAmp where you get more specific music related extras and better playlist management and radios. The main app was and is designed primarily for video which it does well, music not so.
You need to have Plex pass to get the best experience IMO to get anywhere near as good experience as Roon. Without it it’s just the same as a basic upnp server, with less music features.
Understood. However, I don’t really care about anything “advanced” regarding metadata or artwork; basic works just fine for me. To be honest, for my music, I’d just navigate folders most of the time, something Roon is downright adverse to.
I didn’t know about Plex. Roon was the first product I came by that supported multi-room, and the ability to do DSP and customize it won me over - or the geek in me. Now, after a few years, I know better about my priorities. I do like Roon’s interface much better, but at the end of the day, music is in the air, not on the screen.
LMS is better than Plex for mulitroom and again is free and bitperfect and has plenty of plug-ins to add metadata stuff if you want it. Personally I would choose that over Plex. Use the Material Skin Ui and it’s not bad at all no Plex or Roon for UI but as you said music is in the air not a screen. Also supports more streaming services if that’s your thing and adds them to your library.
Yep. Will even run on a pi. In the settings enable the material skin interface as it’s the nicest one then use the web controller. There are 3rd party controllers and squeezlite can be installed on most pcs. Ropieee supports it to. Picore player is the best on a pi though as it allows touchscreen interface like a squeezebox touch. Plug-ins for chromecast, AirPlay and upnp
Agree with @CrystalGipsy on LMS vs Plex. On the rPi, install piCorePlayer to get OS and LMS and a player too if you want it. Streams my 125,000 mostly FLAC files with zero issues, to 3 synched endpoints. https://docs.picoreplayer.org/
Thanks! I installed LVM on my desktop and piCorePlayer on an RPi and it’s playing music! Plex was taking forever to scan my library; LMS seems to have taken seconds.
Plex is more like Roon and it does a lost of work indexing and analysis (especially if you turn on Sonic analysis) that can take weeks on a large library if you’re machine doesn’t have lots of core’s
I have 8 cores (16 logical processors with HT), but the media scanner didn’t seem to be using more than 6% CPU, which is about one logical processor.
I’ve been playing with the piCorePlayer. It supports the 7" screen nicely. You have full control of the playback, visualizations like spectrogram and even VU-meters. Much more than you can do with RoPieee. It seems it supports Tidal, which would be fine as long as I don’t get MQA, but I don’t have a subscription anymore. I could switch from Qobuz to Tidal, since I’m using Qobuz just because of Roon.
squeezlite player (picoreplayer on rPi) and LMS supports Qobuz as well (and Tidal and Spotify). One just needs to install the Qobuz plugin in LMS (LMS > Settings > Plugins > 3rd party plugins. And within LMS, one can have streaming service music integrated with your own music files as an option (a poor man’s Roon, without the deep data integration).
You are absolutely right. It’s a bit confusing, there are apps on mysqueezebox and plugins in the settings. Qobuz is working fine. The plug-in list was a bit too long to go through; I went through it and I see AirPlay, Denon AVR, Chromecast, YouTube… Pretty much everything I need.
Well, I knew my days with Roon were numbered, and it seems that time may be closer than I thought… I played with LMS and apart from a glitch that I was able to resolve, it’s lived up to my expectations. Material skin is the best looking and it has a dark theme, but I can’t seem to find folder browsing there. I can deal with that later. Tested mobile interface also, no issues so far. I’ll try a second player during the weekend to see how it works.
LMS does music folder browsing. I see it in the default webGUI but not in material skin. But it must be possible there as well. I’d suggest asking at the LMS forum for specifics. It is an active forum and the Material Skin developer is fast to answer questions.
