Roon is Media play and music server which allows extensions to be written for it. I wanted to have a box in the lounge which would display what is currently playing. This feature set quickly grew into also wanting to show song position, and album art.
Also, if nothing is playing, then the display goes into screeen saver mode and displays random pictures, the times, and random words from either a dictionary or from books. It also can play midi files for the alarm feature.
To achieve this, 2 components needed to be developed.
* A windows application which integrated with Roon and exposed a socket service
* A hardware device with displays and network capability to comminicate with above application.
This is the hardware unit. From left to right is:
* The main display which shows Artist/Albums/Tracks
* The time 7 Segements which show time elapsed/remaing
* Bar graph display which also shows song position
* Album Cover art display
In Screen save mode, the displays show:
* Date and Time
* Random Words
* Clock and Slide Shows
This is the companion apps. Here it is displaying the arwork of the currently playing album, and midi files for the abum can be seen:
This is the MIDI file converter. As area on the left shows all the tracks which are in the MIDI file, and on the right is the polyphony reducer and Note Stealing and Prioritisation options. This is needed as the device can only play 3 notes at a time.
This is the screen saver image file editor:
And this is the Roon Extension plugin:
wolfeffect 