Zone available standalone and in a group

When I group zones I lose the ability to select the individual zones except as part of the group. Is it possible to do both?

Example I have my HomePod in a group with two Apple TVs. However, I often want to listen to just the HomePod which is in my home office. As far as I can tell I have to ungroup it to do so.

Am I missing something or is this by design?

What do you want to do?

You can see the signal path for each Zone in a group or change DSP or device settings.

You’ve explicitly told the software to treat them as a group, so ermmm…

I have indeed. However, it’s possible to group devices (for example Chromecasts) without losing the ability to select them individually for playback.

The question is is there a way to do that - this is a reasonable use case. If I’m spending the day in my home office I don’t need music playing all over the house.

Ungroup them first. That’s how Sonos, for example, works by multicast. Chromecasts are a special case as they aren’t actually grouped really the software API is just told to talk to one of them and the Chromecasts themselves do the grouping; that’s why you can address an individual.

I think you nailed it with your first suitably terse reply. What I want to do is in the original post.

There’s lot to like about the way grouping is handled but I would like to not have to ungroup zones when I only want one active then to have to regroup them to have multiple. And yes, I know I can just leave it grouped and make sure amps etc are turned off but I find my playback suffers occasionally with groups whereas it’s very stable with single zones.

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Grouping works best with roon certified devices. Chromecast, Sonos, apple groupings using roon are all a bit cludgy as it relies on using the native underlying protocols

Hi @Ian_Robson,

At this time this is not a possibility in Roon. Once a zone is grouped you will need to ungroup it to use it individually.

Since this behavior is currently working “as designed”, I’d like to recommend adding your voice to the Feature Request section of Community. Our product team and developers keep a close eye on that category, so that’s definitely the best place to propose a change like this and get feedback from the Community.

There is an existing feature request you can see here: Save Grouped Zones

Thanks @Dylan - done.

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