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RoPieee XL with Bluetooth Support

RoPieee is an extremely elegant solution for turning a Raspberry Pi into a Roon Bridge. It is now available in a new version with various detail improvements, including Bluetooth support for RoPieee XL.


RoPieee is a software project that has been running for several years, in fact it is almost as old as the software for which it was designed, namely the media management and multi-room audio streaming solution Roon from Roon Labs LLC. It should be noted, however, that RoPieee has nothing to do with Roon Labs LLC. It is an independent project by Harry ten Berge, who continues to improve it.

RoPieee is a Roon Bridge ready-to-go, as the developer himself calls it, using a very simple Raspberry Pi as the basis. As is well known, this “mini-computer” is available for little money and has also been continuously developed and improved for years. Based on a Raspberry Pi, many different projects can be realised, also in the audio field, even with high demands on quality, as RoPieee impressively proves.

If you install RoPieee on a Raspberry Pi, which is done within a very short time and requires almost no expertise, you have a fully-fledged streaming solution for Roon in no time at all, in the simplest case a streaming bridge that can operate separate converters via digital interfaces. Any Roon Tested DAC can be used here, and a variety of special audio solutions developed for the Raspberry Pi are also supported. What is particularly exciting is that RoPieee also supports the 7-inch Raspberry Pi touchscreen, which means that you can also use it to conveniently control music playback via Roon.

How this works has already been reported by sempre-audio.at in the two detailed reports “RoPieee Review – DIY Roon Endpoint with Raspberry Pi” and “DIY Roon Endpoint with Raspberry Pi, Touchscreen and RoPieee in Test”.

In addition to RoPieee, Harry ten Berge also offers RoPieee XL, which is also primarily a Roon Bridge for Raspberry Pi. However, the functionality of RooPieee XL goes a little beyond this “basic function”; it also supports dlna, Apple AirPlay and even Spotify directly.

A new update is now available for both RoPieee and RoPieee XL, which includes various improvements in detail as well as one or two bug fixes.

For RooPie XL, however, a new function is available that might be interesting for some people, namely the support of Bluetooth.

A Rasperry Pi equipped with RoPieee XL can now be used as a Bluetooth endpoint.

As before, RoPieee and RoPieee XL are offered free of charge and can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website. The only investment is the hardware, especially of course a Rasberry Pi.

Getting to the point

For years, Harry ten Berge’s RoPieee has been a simple, flawless and elegant solution for creating a Roon Bridge with the help of a Raspberry Pi. With RoPieee XL, not only RAAT is available, but also dlna, Apple AirPlay and Spotify. With the latest version, Bluetooth is added. And since the software is still offered free of charge…

Manufacturer:RoPieee
Price:Software is free of charge
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Michael Holzinger

Michael Holzinger, founder and editor-in-chief of HiFi BLOG and sempre-audio.at, has been working for years as a journalist in the fields of IT, photography, telecommunications and consumer electronics.

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