Advice before I get started

I’ve been reading about the requirements for Roon and already see it’s not WHS 2011 capable. WHS is where all my media files are stored. Would it be feasible to run the Core on a laptop like this “Acer Aspire S7-392-6832 Ultrabook - Intel Core i5-4200U 1.60 GHz, 8GB DDR3, 128GB SSD” and leave the media files on the server? Or does the media have to exist on the same machine? My main usage will be to play my DSD and MQA files across 10 Sonos zones without having a separate version of the file.

Thanks.

Your music does not need to be stored on the Roon Core. It can be a network shared drive.

Awesome, thank you for the quick reply.

I guess I’ll download and give it a try. Hopefully my laptop is beefy enough. I do have an external display that meets minimum resolution, but I am concerned about the processor since it’s an early generation i5.

The laptop meets the recommended specifications. RAM should be sufficient. The SSD is definitely going to help. Depending on how much DSP you would like to do, the cpu might have trouble keeping up. For garden variety playback of music files, it should do the trick for sure.