Roon

What is Roon?

Roon is a paid service that encourages users to expand their music horizons.   It is particularly good at organising and tagging large music collections.  With a rich user interface, Roon helps music lovers to discover, learn from, and engage with their music collection. It offers the best and seamless access between the local library and music streaming services (Tidal or Qobuz). For an introduction to Roon, please read this.

There are 2 software components that SnakeOil support, Roon Server and Roon Bridge.

What is Roon Server?

Roon Server is the brain of the system. It manages the control and output components, and keeps track of the content in your music library. The server is responsible for:

• Managing your digital music library
  • Discovering your music files
  • Noticing when music files are added, deleted, or modified in real-time
  • Extracting Metadata Tags from your music files
  • Background analysis of your audio content
  • Identifying your music files so we can improve your library with artwork, credits, reviews, and other enhanced metadata.
  • Keeping metadata up to date as new information becomes available and features are added.
• Managing playback to audio outputs
  • Managing a play queue and a set of controls for each Zone.
  • Managing output to multiple Zones, including synchronized playback
  • Retrieving audio from files or internet services and decoding it to PCM or DSD
  • Streaming PCM or DSD audio to outputs
• Driving one or more controls
  • Serving data to controls, whether they are local or networked
  • Responding to requests from controls
  • Providing a synchronized experience across multiple controls
• Other stuff
  • Handling software updates

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/architecture#Roon_Server

What is Roon Bridge?

Roon Bridge is a software package that extends Roon's audio playback capabilities to other devices or computers in your home. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, including inexpensive embedded platforms like the Raspberry Pi.

After installing Roon Bridge on a device, any audio hardware attached to that device is made into an available endpoint to your Roon install exactly as if Roon had direct access to the audio hardware. This enables you to place audio outputs anywhere in your home where you can connect an Ethernet cable or muster a decent WiFi signal, and makes it that much easier to separate the media server from your listening environment. 

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/roonbridge

A setup with both Roon Server and Roon Bridge running on separate boxes has the potential to improve sound quality.

Useful links

Knowledge Base

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/roon-labs-llc

Help Center

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/home

Roon Labs Community

https://community.roonlabs.com/

Tips

SnakeOil limited role

SnakeOil uses Roon's scripts to download and install:

• Roon Server software on AMD hardware
• Roon Bridge software on AMD and Pi hardware.

There is limited knowledge of Roon within the SnakeOil Squad.