Support Spotify Connect In Roon

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.

1 Like

Hi there,

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?

Cheers, Bob

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.

Oh right - I never knew that! I’m amazed they haven’t squashed it yet then. Ok well sounds less than likely to get development time by Roon. Never mind, Roon still easily the best player I’ve come across and I love it.

I would love Spotify. Please adopt it.

Spotify connect is on Volumio. Should be possible to implement it in Roon. Roon has also no integration of podcast. Spotify has it.

Isn’t Spotify Connect a mechanism to allow a device (say iPad) to act as a Controller for a Spotify stream.

It allows Spotify to connect with a Compatible End Point without the controller (iPad) processing the stream . Its a hardware compatibility thing . (At least Tidal Connect is, I assume Spotify to be the same)

How does Roon get involved with this ?

It doesn’t. Plenty of Roon endpoints support multiple sources. Just choose an endpoint that can do Roon and Spotify Connect if that’s what people want.

This whole request hurts my head :slight_smile:

Yep my Cambridge Audio CXN supports Tidal Connect and both Tidal and Spotify apps.

Roon has no impact

That may be the case, however there are community work arounds for Spotify connect which could easily be utilised.
They are mentioned in this thread…

Librespot…

Ropieee for instance supports Librespot…

Surely roon could do the same.

Worst case simply use Ropieee.

Ropieee XL

Roon doesn’t even support Tidal Connect.

Roon Core currently does not broadcast itself as an endpoint for anything (not as a Tidal Connect endpoint, nor Spotify Connect endpoint, nor as an Airplay receiver, nor as a DLNA renderer). To implement this would require a major architecture change to the Roon Core. I can’t even imagine how it would work from a user experience perspective.

Whether it makes sense to incorporate Spotify Connect or AirPlay into Roon is another matter.

I guess could be useful if you wanted to apply DSP or to play it across existing Roon zones. Likewise if your speaker or amp/endpoint can’t support Spotify or Airplay and you want to playback a Podcast, Audiobook or some other kind of audio stream (like MixCloud) that Roon doesn’t currently support.

But in terms of interface, I don’t see what would be complex from a design point of views. I’d imagine you’d add a UI element / menu to the Roon App named “input source”.

Below is how my current HiFiBerryOS endpoints handle it, most audio devices handle it similarly.

Compared with some request this feels like a fairly low hanging fruit. My guess Roon’s reservations are more around building in functionally that it dependent (long term) on reverse engineered open source libraries like librespot & shareport. In the case of Spotify it also clouds the message regarding what services Roon actually supports, which could prove problematic.



If you want connect via Roons playback engine then use this. You not going to get Roon to add something that bypasses their own app and search and library functions as that undermines what Roon actually is and it’s own eco system.

1 Like

The way I imagine it might work is that Roon broadcasts each zone as a Spotify Connect endpoint. In the Spotify app, a user would see “Roon office”, “Roon Chromecast”, “Roon living room”, etc as targets. It is different from anything currently in Roon and I don’t see this as low hanging fruit. It really depends on how the Roon software has been written and whether it lends itself to adding this type of function and integration.

Its so against what their goals are for Roon it just doesn’t fit. To step out of Roon to use someone’s elses app to play music isn’t what they are about at all. You want Spotify use their app and a connect enabled device.

2 Likes