Something I've always wondered about the UI

One of the reasons I’m crazy about Roon is the UI. It’s intuitive, it’s powerful and it looks and feels great. However, my first experience of multi-room audio was AirPlay, and its checkboxes for each output. It made perfect sense. Then when I extricated myself from the Apple ecosystem, everything was based around Chromecast. It worked but grouping audio was a total PITA- having to create groups for every possible permutation - Yuk. Roon’s groups are, IMO, way better than that but nowhere near as good as Airplay’s. What’s the difficulty in having checkboxes for endpoints? Is there an IP issue?

Multiroom / zone can only group certain similar endpoints - similar in the streaming format used…airplay or RAAT or chromecast etc

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As @wizardofoz (love that name) said it depends on the kind of end point. That is why is so simple for airports on Mac, there are just one kind. But I agree that the UI for this could a bit more intuitive, getting a small screen with the endpoints listed by kind and checkboxes to group them and also saving configurations. But I do not know any tech details so maybe it is not as easy as thinking about it.

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Agreed it could be way better regardless of types of zones. Apples method just doesn’t allow you group certain zones. For instance I can’t group my RopieeeXl AirPlay zone with my Sonos ARC or Naim system but those two can be grouped together, not sure if this is because they are both Airplay2 and Ropieee is not. Same sort of thing could be used in Roon so that only the same device types show as being able to group. Ideally you also want to still have each zone as an individual and a group so you have two options. Having to group and ungroup is a PiTA.

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A lot of the friction, to my mind, comes from having Transfer Zone under the volume control rather than the Zone menu. For all I know (I’m quite new here…) it’s been moved for some reason but it doesn’t seem like the most logical place for it…:person_shrugging:

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Check boxes would be better but I don’t think of grouped zones that way and it has to do more with tearing down a zone.

When you “create” a group zone think of it as a new zone. It’s not really adding and subtracting endpoints. It’s literally creating, tearing down, and creating new a zone every time you make a change. You’re no longer playing to a device + other things. You’re playing to this zone which just happens to hold more than one device. This is also why the individual devices go away when grouped. The individual device zone doesn’t exist only the group its part of.

My Apple device “owns” the group and no one else can use it. Than can takeover a device via Airplay and the grouped Airplay devices but they don’t “see” a Zone like in Roon. That group doesn’t have a queue for example my device has a queue and the output is simply “airplay” and its current, device, configuration for what Airplay is.

The additional complication of creating a new Zone… makes simple check boxes a little, maybe a lot, harder to get right in the UI.

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Makes a lot of sense. Thanks

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