I know Roon wants deep integration with music streaming but if Spotify doesn’t allow their API to be integrate into Roon, Roon should provide an alternative way of playing back Spotify. Spotify is the world biggest music streaming providers with more 100 million paying subscribers. Providing a platform for playing back help to increase Roon subscribers rate. I think this is a simple maths.
Not many music streaming providers want to give their APIs and provided if they already can support hardware playback, it too can be done on the Roon. I’ve switch from Tidal to Spotify because of the huge music database and intrusive interface. In the end of day, it is contents really matters not so much of the quality if it can be improved over time.
I am currently on a 14-day Roon trial and will most probably cancel it as it does not have Spotify Connect. I can’t convince myself spending this amount of money on software that does not have one of the key features that I am looking for.
You are right that t’s software, but that doesn’t sound like a good explanation why it cannot have Spotify capabilities. [Note: At the time of writing this post, I did not know that Spotify is refusing to cooperate with Roon.] Let me re-phrase it to avoid confusion about Spotify Connect. If Roon does not support Spotify streaming through a plug-in, then it’s lacking a feature that I am looking for.
I am currently running Volumio on a RPi (with Allo DigiOne board) and Volumio allows the installation of a Spotify (Connect) plugin.
Roon is of course much more powerful than Volumio, but doesn’t have a feature that I do not want to miss.
The team here have made it clear on the forum, the Spotify issue is on their end, not Roon’s. You can set Volumio up as a Roon end point and Spotify connect end point, like other hardware.
Thx for clarification. I haven’t seen the explanation from the Roon team (just joined the forum today). Good to know that Spotify should be pressured. I will certainly do that.
I have set up Volumio as Roon endpoint already, but wanted to use my DAC as (direct) endpoint and not go through the RPi & Volumio. I am not sure if I understand the 2nd part of your explanation “…and Spotify connect end point”. I would prefer to use one App on my smartphone to control one software (Roon, …) that can stream Spotify and play music from my NAS.
Current setup:
NAS + Spotify
RPi (w/ Allo Digione Signature) & Volumio
RME ADI-2 DAC
Desired setup:
NAS + Spotify
Mac Mini & Roon
RME ADI-2 DAC
You are not going to be able to have that in one set of software as far as I know. If you switch out to a hardware solution like a Bluenode it may give you that ability. You could change to Tidal, it supplies a higher resolution stream than Spotify and it is integrated with Roon. That is what most people here use for streaming. Try it, they offer trials.
TIDAL is unfortunately not available in my country of residence (Japan).
I’ll check out if some of the software that Rogue Amoeba is offering would be able to solve my problem. If not, I’ll probably have to stick with my current setup which is in fact not too bad.
Andy, for what it’s worth, I also live in Japan and have been using Tidal for some time. If you are able to subscribe to your home country version of the service, it will work from Japan.
I thought Roon was going to be the answer for my needs, but lack of Spotify is a deal breaker as far as I am concerned.
I find most of the reasoning here to be a bit suspect. I understand Spotify can decide whether or not to support a commercial partner, but they have no reason not to support Roon unless Roon wants to do it in a way that Spotify doesn’t like. Given they will typically let Connect on everything, it probably has something to do with interfacing or mixing music sources? Anyway it is speculation but it takes two to argue.
Similarly, if Roon supported plug-ins, an enterprising dev could port over snapcast or slimserver spotify connect apis.
I just want the ability to use Spotify connect in multiple zones with a REW EQ applied. I was hoping Roon was the answer but it isn’t.
Roon may have a solution one day but right now, there is another way… @jussi_laako’s HQPlayer… I use Spotify Connect feeding into HQPlayer for DSP.
I don’t use HQP’s built-in digital room EQ feature (yet) which let’s you import convolution filters but it’s there…
Using a miniDSP USBStreamer (optical INPUT and USB output) I connect to USB of my HQP Server… Then HQPlayer Embedded handles the DSP.
So you just need a TOSlink source to feed into the USBStreamer… there are a few Spotify Connect TOSlink sources fortunately. A nice one is the newest Bluesound Node 2i which supports both Spotify Connect and Airplay 2. I also have a Raspberry Pi3/HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro (optical output) running Moode Audio, running Spotify Connect.
Using HQPlayer NAA’s (‘endpoints’) I can send Spotify Connect (or any optical source audio) over the network to other NAA’s…
Happy to discuss and help in another thread if you like…
Spotify connect is disjointed from the Roon experience which is to have a fully integrated library regardless of where it comes from. You can’t do this with connect it’s just essentially a glorified cast.
Just wondering whether there is any reason not to add Spotify Connect to the Nucleus / ROCK software?
I’d like to do this simply so I can use one set of hardware (my Nucleus and the rest of the chain) for all my music listening needs. I’ve invested a fair bit in the hardware I have, so if I could use it to play both my local content and as a Spotify Connect endpoint that would be perfect!
To be clear, I know we can never integrate Spotify into Roon itself, but this seems like a good halfway house… thoughts?
Thinking a bit more about this… so that the extra codebase doesn’t have to impact users who don’t need it, maybe there could be a switch or a version which turns the feature on or off a bit like the RoPieeeXL version of RoPieee?
Connect would need licensing which is a cost, that would need to be recouped. Roon is a commercial product not free like all other apps that include Libspotify. Since most hifi already allow Spotify connect or its easy to add it with a free solution it serves no purpose being in Roon. It goes against Roons whole ecosystem. If you want Spotify buy a connect enabled device your hard pushed to find anything these days that doesn’t support it.
Ah right - I didn’t realise Roon would need to pay licensing costs to include LibSpot in their product. So the maker of RoPieeeXL doesn’t need to pay a license because he’s giving away the image? Even so, my original point was that I don’t want to have to buy any more hardware to play Spotify - I already have more than capable hardware which it would be great to have Spotify capability built into.
No libspot has nothing to do with Spotify it’s unsupported open source product that reveresed engineered Spotify connect and the Web API and as a result is tolerated in os that are essentially free such as LMS, Volumio, Ropieee, dietpi. Put that in a commercial product and you open yourself up to whole heap of legal some such as mini DSP sell their streamer with Volumio installed and could really get in to trouble. 99.9% of products use officials Spotify connect API which will be under license.