Quick roon question

If either of those two features (particularly the first one - a Linux control app) were present, I'd probably have stuck with Roon

Have you looked at the WebControl extension. Appears to do exactly what you are looking for.

Messed with it for a while but was never able to get it running to my satisfaction. It's not an official Roon program but rather something put together by another user.

Not to disrail this thread, I'll just wrap it up this way. LMS works well for the way I choose music. Roon had some glitzy features but to justify $120 a year, it would have had to fire on all cylinders. As noted previously, it didn't.

LMS served me for many many years.  The reason I got off it was the very nice Tidal / local music integration as well as built in DSP capabilities.

I can search for an artist across everything I have and everything Tidal has.  Those two things were more than just glitzy.  The LMS Tidal support was always mediocre at best.

Different strokes for different folks. As noted, was very close to being a Roon subscriber and may still be in the future depending on how their software evolves.

You should theoretically be able to keep your hard drive plugged into the Bryston and run roon core on your laptop. I can’t guarantee that it will work this way with the BDP2 but I was able to set this up with my Auralic. When you install roon on your laptop and launch the core, go to settings then storage and add new storage thru the dropdown menu. You will need to know your Bryston’s IP address. The storage path you are adding should look something like this:
\\192.....\USB\Music
where 192.... is your Bryston IP. You will then wait until roon scans the drive. How long depends on the size of your library. One aspect of it that I’m still trying to figure out is how the music is being played from
the hdd...is it being passed to roon core via  network and then back to the transport? Or does Roon use some sort of index or pointer that tells the transport what file to play. 

You would also want to experiment with the drive connected to your roon core laptop as well. Don’t limit your setup to any particular config. Try what works and sounds best.