ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Hello all,
I know many of you are using Roon and you might be in the same situation as I am and try to integrate Roon as a multiroom source in your setup. I am playing around with the idea quite some time and I have tried many different things. My last attempt to solve this issue (let's hope that at some point B&O will incorporate Roon in its sources) involves a BLI, a Raspberry Pi4 running hifiberry, and a beo6.
Raspberry is connected to the line in of a beosound moment (my experience with the moment as far as multiroom is concerned is very bad, especially if you run a big multiroom setup so I will swap it with an essence mkii within the next days). The beosound moment is programmed to send all control and light commands to the BLI. The BLI has a custom http connection with the raspberry pi. The raspberry pi is programmed to react to events triggered by the state of the moment which happens either by the bli app or ir commands sent from the beo6.
Basic commands are working fine, for example when a.aux is sent by the beo6 or line-in from the bli app then the moment turns on and the raspberry starts playing roon. If the source is changed let's say from a.aux to music then the raspbery pi pauses. For the next/previous track commands I had to use a control command sent from the beo6 since commands like step up or step down are not supported by the moment in the line-in source.
A.Aux was changed to Roon on the beo6 to be easier for all of the users to remember but in the bli app it is not possible to change the name of a source (at least to my knowledge).
It is super practical especially if you listen to a kind of music most of the time. In our house we enjoy listening to vocal jazz so it is very convenient to just press a button and have an endless playlist of vocal jazz. In the case that we feel more adventurous there is still the possibility to use any ipad/iphone in order to browse Roon's library.
So to wrap it up
Basic commands: Start, Stop, Pause, Next Track, Previous Track, Volume Up, Volume Down, Standby are all working flawlessly.
Components Used: Beosound Moment, Beo6, Raspberry Pi4 running HiFiBerry, Beoliving Inteligence Gateway.
Multiroom works fine since the Line-Out source of the Moment is distributable BUT if you have "legacy" generation products you will experience many sound drop outs. If you multiroom to newer products you might experience some issues if you connect more than 3 products (in my setup all B&O products are connected on a linksys switch, a linksys router is used and all cabling is CAT6)
Higher resolution files are played without issues since the processing is done in the Roon Core (I am using a NUC i5 16GB RAM).
It is a very nice solution till our beloved Danes integrate Roon in their products.