I was thinking of getting some Bluetooth ear phones for the wife’s Christmas present. I’ve been looking at the RoPieee XL interface and several questions arise as I’d like her to be able to use Roon rather than her phone for music.
At present I’m hard wired to the Raspberry Pi4b and use an external DAC rather than a HAT. I’ve used the RoPieee XL interface to turn on wi-fi in the network and it rebooted and all looks OK. My confusion is in setting up Bluetooth as the drop-down gives two choices - USB or HAT, neither of which seem to apply. Does USB refer to the DAC connection? Must I have a HAT for Bluetooth to work and therefore need another Raspberry for her to use? I have a Pi3b with a HAT already but I’ve read it should be a Pi4b for Bluetooth to work.
Will she be able to use the wireless phones via Bluetooth and control Roon via the i-pad? Her phone is android but assume that is not an issue.
RoPieee’s bluetooth is not for streaming from the Pi, but to the Pi.
This means that you can stream content via bluetooth to the Pi; hence you need to have an audio output on the Pi.
Silly question, but is Roon installed on her phone? I use my phone to play Roon to my Bluetooth devices (speakers, headphones, etc.). This will also give her the flexibility to move around the house/yard/etc. as long as she is in range of your WiFi and brings the phone as apposed to needing to be in range of a “tethered” device (i.e. a Pi plugged into the wall).
If she can connect the wireless headphones via bluetooth to the iPad (she almost certainly can) then she can use the iPad as a Roon endpoint. Just enable it under audio settings. You might be best doing this on the iPad itself.
You may also want to disable the ‘private zone’ checkbox if you want to control playback on any device other than the one the bluetooth headphones are directly connected to.
I’d suggest going with the route above ie. connect the headphone to the device you’re using to control playback (and make it a Roon endpoint) as you’ll be using that device anyway.
But (and I wouldn’t go this route unless you have good reason to) you can also use a USB Bluetooth ‘SoundCard’ Adaptor like the Sennheiser-BTD500-USB connected directly to the machine running the Core. This is a special kind of Bluetooth USB adaptor as it appears as a ‘SoundCard’ in Roon, most regular Bluetooth USB adaptors don’t work like this and hence won’t work with Roon.
You’d then have to pair your Bluetooth headphones with the BTD500. This can be a bit fiddly as you need to insert and un-insert the dongle to force it into pair mode, so not ideal if you also pair your BT headphone with lots of other devices.
The only real advantage to this route I can think of is if you have a dedicated pair of BT headphone that you tend only to use with Roon you can leave them permanently paired. Roon/iOS already does a pretty good job of muting Roon when other apps need to output audio or forcing Roon into exclusive mode where Roon takes precedence over all other audio. To be honest as your likely pt be using the iPad to control playback you may as well pair the headphone to the iPad and enable the iPad as an audio zone/output in Roon.
Thanks Jamie. I’ll try the iPad - actually it’s a Samsung - route and see what happens. I’m new to Roon so the endpoint aspect does throw me a bit - the Roon core is on my PC in another room.
