How I put Roon’s ‘now playing’ screen on a TV & computer monitor

“Now playing”? With vinyl, we hold or put on display a twelve-inch sleeve that gives us photos, liner notes and song lyrics. CDs give us a similarly visual and tactile experience but boiled down to five inches. But what about streaming: what do we look at while listening?

One way to elevate streaming’s visual presence is to use the TV that – more often than not – sits between the loudspeakers. I have my Roon Core (server) pipe ‘now playing’ data over the LAN to the third-party TV:Remote app running on an Apple TV. It puts album art, artist photo, artist name, song title and album title along with a playback progress bar on a Samsung ‘The Frame’ TV. I’ve shown this in action almost every YouTube video we’ve made in the last three years!

Earlier this year, I re-configured TV:Remote through the Extensions pane in Roon to show only the cover art; no associated text and – crucially – no rotating between the album art and artist photo every thirty seconds. It’s a stable image from which I can see which artist is playing at a glance. On the rare occasion that the cover art doesn’t give up the artist’s name, I pull up the Roon Remote app on my phone.

The downside of this AppleTV-centric setup is that I have to turn on the TV, switch it to the Apple TV’s input and fire up the TV:Remote app each time I wish to use it.

This week, I decided to set up a smaller and always-on ‘now playing’ screen that would sit on the far right side of the front wall. It would occupy the middle shelf of a €30 IKEA NISSAFORS serving trolley. A Degritter record cleaning machine sits on the top shelf and a network switch and power adaptor on the bottom.

For this always-on display, I used three pieces of hardware:

1. The IKEA shelf is only 10″ high, which rules out larger computer monitors. I pulled a WHOLEV 10″ monitor from storage. This was last used in our 2020 video about the Xiaomi Mi Box S. The WHOLEV monitor’s plastic frame houses a 1280px x 800px IPS panel. It’s a low-quality display but, more importantly, the right size for my needs. US$80.

2. This dinky monitor has an HDMI input to make it match-ready for a Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K‘s HDMI output. US$80 or less. Why a Chromecast device and not another Apple TV? All video-centric Chromecast devices can play catch on Roon’s ‘now playing’ information without having to install a third-party app.

3. (This last bit of electronics is optional but) I bought a USB-C-to-RJ45 Ethernet charger/adapter to bypass the Chromecast’s wifi connectivity and hardwire it onto my LAN with an Ethernet cable. US$15. This adapter allows us to slipstream an Ethernet data feed into the Chromecast dongle over its USB-C input.

My total spend was US$165 but you could probably cobble something similar together for less. The key piece of hardware is the Google Chromecast which we set up with the Google Home app and log in to with a Google account.

Once that’s done, we park the Google remote and dive into Roon’s ‘Displays’ settings panel to activate the Chromecast 4K as a Roon display and – in my case – disable song lyrics. Because lyrics scrolling on a screen are for karaoke bars and teenagers.

Clicking the volume icon in the bottom right corner of the Roon screen should then show that the Chromecast 4K is ready to receive a Roon endpoint’s ‘now playing’ information. We use the TV icon to nominate it.

The upshot, in my case, is that the Mola Mola Tambaqui streaming DAC still receives audio data as it did before the Chromecast’s introduction but the Roon server now sends cover art, artist name, song title, album name, an artist photo and a playback progress bar to the Google dongle for display on the connected monitor.

This smaller ‘now playing’ screen isn’t perfect. The 10″ monitor size means the text is too small to read from the listening position without squinting. Frustratingly, the artist’s photo occupies the largest amount of screen real estate. If no artist photo is available, an (often pixelated) detail of the cover art is shown in its place. Me? I would prefer to see no artist photo at all.

If I coded Roon, that space would be given over to cover art on the left of the screen and the artist’s name on the right (and written in the largest font possible). Underneath the artist’s name, I would (optionally) show the song and album title in a smaller font — users would turn them on/off with checkboxes, just as we do right now with song lyrics. Lastly, I would ditch the playback progress bar.

Think about it: when we hear a song on the radio, in a TV show or via Roon Radio, our first thought isn’t “I wonder which album this is from” or even “I wonder what this song is called”. Those are secondary and tertiary questions. No: what we want to see answered upfront is “WHO IS THIS?”.

Moreover, with a ‘now playing’ screen layout favouring cover art and artist name, even a 10″ monitor would trounce the listening position readability of any streaming DAC currently offered by Bluesound, Eversolo, WiiM, FiiO and Hifi Rose.

Further information: Roon