RoPieee with two sources

Audio Gear Talk RoPieee
1

I have a RPi 4 RoPiee (2026.03 Stable) connected to Topping E30II DAC with USB and it’s been working like a dream when I have been using it as a pure Roon endpoint.

I was fooling around with Music Assistant, it can play through Squeezelite and since RoPieee supports that I decided to try, and yes, it sounds and work fine.

Then came the issue, if I stop playback on Roon starting Music Assistant does not generate sound. And vice versa. So there’s some issues on how RoPiee decides what source to let through.

USB Audio is enabled, no HAT used. Same E30II is set up as audio output in Services → Squeezelite.

Seems sort of wasteful to invest in another DAC just for another source, so is this by design or is there something else I could try to do?

2

There is not…. except that it takes a few seconds after stopping a certain service before it releases the audio device.

So ,for example, when you stop playing audio with Squeezelite, you need to wait a few seconds before you can start playing via Roon.

And for completeness: this is certainly not ‘by design’, this is just how audio devices work on Linux: only 1 application can have access at the time.*

( disclaimer: technically there are solutions, but in general they have a negative impact on sound quality, and that’s not something we want :wink: )

3

This was something I sort of expected, but there is something suspicious.

I stopped Music Assistant some minutes ago, starting anything on Roon still does not work.

At first I thought Music Assistant is leaving the stream on somehow, I shut Music Assistant gracefully down, still no sound on play with Roon.

I can make it work if I reboot RoPieee, but that’s not practical.

I still think something is off here?

4

If I go to Roon audio settings, apply some changes on the RoPieee device it starts to work, and now it seems to work normally, meaning the few seconds waiting works.

Need to follow this a bit.