I have Roon > HQPlayer > mRendu working fine.
How can I channel Windows audio through this setup? Then I can use DAC / mRendu path for Roon and Windows (I.e. YouTube)
Thanks
Zane
I don’t think you can. I tried and could not get HQP to see any windows audio output. Roon has special code that enables this that windows doesn’t have. If anyone has figured out a way to make it work please advise.
I was hoping that someone might have written a WDM driver which would route all Windows audio to HQPlayer. I thought that @jussi_laako or Sonore might even be interested as it would increase the value of HQPlayer and microRendu.
Lets see what ideas come up.
HQPlayer Embedded supports that in couple of ways. These all depend on hardware at the HQPlayer device side.
- Traditional S/PDIF or AES/EBU, especially Toslink is good in this case because it provides complete galvanic isolation between the source and HQPlayer computer. Exact functionality depends on the input device. The most capable input device for this purpose at the moment is RME ADI-2 Pro, you gain also very good quality analog inputs, up to 768/32 PCM and DSD256 too (for vinyl, etc).
- Using USB, this requires hardware that has USB device side capable port and still has some limitations
Option (1) is of course not limited to WDM as source, but works with all kinds of hardware, Mac’s, old CD-spinners, Google’s Chromecast Audio dongle, streamers like Bluesound Node 2, Auralic etc.
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I haven’t been able to work out what HQPlayer embedded is for. Is that the software on the microRendu?
It is essentially software for building upsampling network “streamer” with all the DSP functionality. Closest similar product is probably dCS Vivaldi Upsampler. But of course HQPlayer has more DSP functionality. And you do all the things quite a bit cheaper. HQPlayer Embedded is just software stack (with or without OS included), so you can select hardware you like.
microRendu can be used as networked audio endpoint with it, but it doesn’t have enough CPU power to run HQPlayer Embedded.
Hi Zane,
In very broad terms HQPlayer embedded is to HQPlayer as Roon Server is to Roon.
Roon users are mainly interested in HQPlayer embedded as headless server software that can be configured via a web page. This installation guide may help.
Just for those that may not be aware but Jussi has a fully USB bootable image for HQP Embedded that is significantly easier than having to first install Ubuntu.
Burn the image to USB flash drive using Etcher and you’re off and running.