Roon with Home Assistant and Matter

Anyone got real world experience of using roon with Home Assistant or Matter?

Building a house and keen to fully automate.

I’ve made pretty extensive use of Home Assistant. I also maintain the home assistant roon integration.

I use zwave and zigbee in my home, but haven’t tried matter.

Happy to try and answer any questions.

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@GregD beat me to it :slightly_smiling_face:

Also take a look in the Tinkering category of the Forum - you’ll find posts on HA there…

https://community.roonlabs.com/search?q=home%20assistant%20%23tinkering%20

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Adding to @Geoff_Coupe’s link - here is the main HA roon integration thread.

There is a lot about early development, but the later discussion may give you an idea about how people are using it.

I use Roon with HA.

I deploy HA on a Pi and use a SONOFF Zigbee antenna. I use Zigbee to support IKEA controllers and a few other devices. I use the IKEA controllers as Roon volume controllers via HA integrations and blueprints. More specifically, I run Zigbee2MQTT on HA and so the controllers end up looking like MQTT devices and I can automate baed on MQTT events. Depending on how well versed you are in this stuff, this may sound like nonsense but it’s not that hard to get going if you’re reasonably technical.

I do a bunch of other stuff including lights, security cams, window shades, door locks, garage door opener, thermostat, etc. I can talk more about specific products if you’re interested. I automate a small number of things based on time of day but most of my automation is in the interest of using Apple Home as a central point of management, which also results in Siri working for pretty much everything. I know that Siri doesn’t directly support NZ, so this may or may not work as well for you as it does for me and my family with our American accents.

If you have specific questions, I’m happy to try to answer them.

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Thanks for that,

I’m a wee while away from doing it all, I’m building a house later next year that probably won’t be ready until mid 2025 at the earliest so still in the research phase.

It will be a big house with about 7 - 10 audio zones running off roon and given I own a solar business, there will be a lot of solar on the roof and storage and I like the look of HA as it plays nice with Fronius and Tesla and I want to be able to do a lot of smart activation of underfloor heating, pool and spa heat pumps etc.

Ikea is not yet in NZ although the first is being built in Auckland so will check out those controllers etc. and keep looking at what I can do with it.

Cheers

Hi,
I’m getting my music distribution system with Roon configured with home assistant. I have a roon endpoint feeding an Anthem 4-zone distribution amp, and pleased to be able to control amp volume in the zones with HA. The volume controls are working fine. It would be nice to have an additional state, volume_mute, corresponding to the mute button, to add to volume_up and volume_dn in the Roon remote app. I’d use that to reset inputs, outputs etc, when things get out of sync.

Even better would be to implement the volume slider. I know this is a lot more involved, but I’m having some trouble convincing “the other user” that controls with HA in a multi-zone setting are worth losing the volume slider.

And, to take it to an even higher level of support for multi-zone systems would be a multi-volume control that allows you to control multiple amp zones from one roon zone. Right now I just enable roon outputs on my computer that aren’t connected to anything and grouped with the endpoint feeding the amp. I connect the HA volume controls for the distribution amp to those endpoints to provide an interface to control the amplifier output. If there’s a slicker way to connect multiple volume controls to one endpoint I’d like to know.

I appreciate your contribution, it’s been really interesting and helpful getting into this.

Hi Trent,

I can take a look at adding a mute, my multi roon system supports this - so I should be able to develop & test.

Roon supports an external slider volume control ( I use rooExtends’s rooADI with my RME that uses this api). Unfortunately my multi-room system doesn’t support this, and I don’t have anything integrated into HA that does - so I’d struggle to develop or test this. If you’re a developer would be very happy to help if you fancy having a go.

My multi-room system has wall mounted control units - so I don’t want to lose these (for playing the radio and changing volume they work perfectly), but if I were to start from scratch I’d just use multiple roon endpoints through dedicated amplifiers, and use grouping when I wanted to sync zones.

I used to attached a tuner and CD player to my multi roon system - but now all inputs are roon endpoints.

I have one zone where the ceiling speakers are attached to Ropiee with an amp HAT which works very well.

I’ve used IKEA 5 button remotes which are great.

So you could consider using a roon endpoint for each of your 4 inputs - and just treat the anthem as a multi zone amplifier - and then use roon grouping when you want to play the same thing in multiple zones. My Ikea remote has a group button!

Sorry not to have a more concrete solution…

Will take a look at mute, and let me know if you fancy writing some python code!

You probably know but using Ropieee (with HATs or usb DACs) or Wiim you can have multiple modestly priced endpoints

Hi Greg,

Thanks for getting back to me. All of the stuff I suggested would be helpful, but the work you’ve already done is great, and helps me a lot. I am familiar with the other endpoints, and it is a direction I’ve already considered (in fact have implemented), but there are a few reasons I’m trying to simplify my music system as much as possible. I have a Control4 automation system, but it’s been a struggle getting my integrator to integrate the Roon driver, so I’m trying to get this system set up to work independently of Control4 more-or-less. I also have other sources to play, which I can’t control from the Roon interface. And my wife has “connected” with the Roon interface, so whenever I have her try other control apps I’m face with questions along the lines of “why can’t it be more like Roon?” Basically, I’m trying to turn Roon into my home automation app! :stuck_out_tongue: . Another issue I’ve found with Roon, is that my system is more like a multi-zone system, because each zone can be heard from other zones, and Roon groups don’t always synchronize perfectly, producing an echo effect that is sometimes pleasing, sometimes not. A multizone amp playing a single source addresses that.

So I have discovered the integration of Lutron pico switches (similar to the Ikea switches I think), and a blueprint by exciton that pulls all button triggers into a single automation and supports long presses (which effectively doubles the number of controls available). I am using this to control volume in the rooms, but also to turn the amplifier off and on in the rooms. I’m also settling on a configuration with two endpoints, and using a long press of the favourite button to switch between the endpoints, so I can group them that way.

A roon event trigger for the Roon volume mute button would solve the biggest outstanding barrier to my goal of having consistency between the pico button controls and roon app controls: being able to mute a zone with the volume control in the roon app. For now it’s not a problem to just find the pico button and press it, but a working mute button would be a nice bonus.

And I need to explore the other automations you’ve implemented. I need to insulate my wife from yet-another-automation-system, but it’s great fun for me to find out what all can be done. And I appreciate your contribution to making my life both simpler - and more complex :wink:

Kind regards,

Trent

@Trent_Kaiser Always great to hear people are fining my code useful - thanks!

I’ve started looking at mute. I think it should be straight forward - will confirm…

Just for clarity the roon volume api I’m using is stateless - so the mute is a single mute toggle command (rather than mute / unmute)

Can you confirm that will be useful?

BTW if you haven’t already - take a look at this - which might help with your group sync. I used to have my studio monitors at home (they’re PMCs with digital inputs that use DSP to implement crossovers - and so introduce a delay - I adjusted this parameter which largely fixed the issue).

Lastly if you have other inputs - perhaps investigate RooPlay. This lets you play other inputs via roon. For some types of input - it can also automatically start the destination zone when it sees a signal.

Hi Greg.
I expected the toggle command would be stateless. If I want to mute/unmute I’ll have to test the state of the amplifier to see if it’s a mute or an unmute. But I think I’ll go a little further than that . . . if it’s not muted then I’ll mute and re-initialize everything else in the zone. So I see the mute event as a stepping stone into some important functionality for me.
I’ve found the grouping delay can be dependent on the music format being played, so once I get it sync’d perfectly on one album, it seem haywire on another. And I definitely need to check out RooPlay.
Thanks!

As an alternative, you might consider using Philips Hue Tap Dials. This remote has a rotating control on the outside as well as four buttons. I created an HA blueprint that allows for single tap and long press for each button as well as customization of how the volume control works.

If you look down a few posts in the thread, you can see me iterating on using stickers to customize the look of the control. The first attempt wasn’t great, but the second attempt was pretty good though it requires a Cricut cutter.

This is more complicated than the Lutron approach because it requires the use of Zigby2MQTT including a Zigby antenna.

I’m traveling on vacation through early April and in areas with little or no reception. I may not get back to this thread for a while.

@Trent_Kaiser I’ve added Mute toggle to the roon Home Assistant integrtion.

You can follow progress here: Add mute_toggle to roon volume events by pavoni · Pull Request #114171 · home-assistant/core · GitHub