Alternative to Sooloos C15 that works for both Roon and Sooloos?

Hi

First post here and at aged 81 am unsure about moving from Sooloos to Roon as most people have. I’ve had numerous problems with Sooloos over the last 6 years so no question a more reliable, more modern and simpler system has big appeal.

My latest problem was a breakdown in one twinstore with 5000+ albums on board and there was no warning of this and two supposedly rugged Constellation HDDs died.
But these albums were not lost because I had a backup although recent editing on them was. So I decided to buy two new 2TB HDDs for that twinstore and also two new 4TB HDDs for the other twinstore – I have a library of over 15,500 music album files in two stores. It was only after ordering and paying for these HDDs I became aware of Roon but understand twinstores cannot be used with Roon – Correct?

My system is:
Control 10 (aging and has had several repairs)
MS600 (using balanced digital, unbalanced digital and analog feeds around the house to 6 locations, which, incidentally, also have LAN feeds)
Two twinstores, one with 2TB HDDs, the other with 4TB HDDs
A variety of non Meridian DACs, head amps, headphones, amplifiers & speakers around the house to take feeds from the MS600.
A 32GB iPad 2 to remote control the system (not compatible with Roon?)

I might indeed eventually move across to Roon but am loathe to scrap the “investment” (silly inapplicable term) in Sooloos gear, particularly as the feeds from the MS600 work so well. But I am looking at replacing the C10. The options are
(i) a used C15, now discontinued by Meridian but coming used onto the market at interesting prices (I could get one for around 2000 euros) or
(ii) some other compatible touch screen – hence my leader question.
I’m happy to rip using dbPoweramp so do not need a C10 or C15 for that so a touch screen that duplicates all C10/C15 functions is all I need.

But then maybe better to bite the bullet and move to Roon?
One hesitation I have is that in the last 6 years I have edited many, many Sooloos files (but there are still 1000s left to tidy up and insert reviews) to suit my personal preferences and it does all I require but I understand that with Roon I would lose all that Sooloos editing and I might end up no better off with my collection of over 11,600 classical albums and 3800 Jazz & pop. On the other hand Roon might update all albums and make further editing unnecessary and the two HP notebooks here with 17” screens, although bulkier, would be better to control the system that the iPad2 anyway? Or, even better, a larger portable touch screen to replace the C10 and iPad – or am I dreaming?

The more I think about it, the more attractive Roon sounds. Note that with a library of over 15,000 albums, I’m not really interested in adding any more so that side of Roon is no plus for me.

Any input from ex Sooloos users would be much appreciated.
TIA
John

I should have added above that I have an 120GB SSD in the C10.

The more I read here the more tempting Roon looks.

It seems I can still use the MS600 - right? If so that is great because it leaves the current room hookups as is and suits well because two of my DACs do not have LAN inputs.

But the C10 and TwinStores cannot be used. Sad. Maybe I can tempt a friend to buy them.

So I need an NAS unit which will handle twin 6TB HDDs and connects to the core and MS600 by LAN. Someone please recommend a suitable NAS unit.

Note I’m still using Windows 7 and it is 64 bit on this relatively new ASUS (Z87PRO motherboard) PC with a 250GB SSD C drive and 4 other internal HDDs. But I’m not sure I want to use this PC as the core so please suggest alternatives. Note I’m not hankering after MQA or even Hi rez as I’m happy with the AQ from the current FLAC files [Sadly old age takes its toll on high frequency hearing].

I note that the recommendation for an iPad is one with 64GB but my iPad 2 only has 32Mb. But I’m not a great fan of Apple anyway so would be happy to move to another touch screen - now coming right back to my original question. I’m also not impressed with the iPad size so would like something bigger up to 17" although I note that not all tablets are compatible with Roon. Any recommendations here?

To summarize:

  1. What NAS unit to take 6TB HDDs?
  2. What core system would suit being linked to the MS600.
  3. Any large tablet recommended for a Roon system?

Note I’m happy to spend on quality reliable hardware so basically the budget is not an issue. [For all its high expense my journey with Meridian has not been a happy one reliability wise - my 861 processor blew up and nuked all attached boards, the HD621 bricked when upgrading the software, the C10 has had several repairs and it does seem the problem this month with dying HDDs could even be a TwinStore fault].

TIA for advice

John

Hi John, a quick initial reply.
The MS 600 works as an endpoint with Roon. I have two MS200’s and my old MC200 (Old Sooloos Core) as another endpoint. Also a Meridian Explorer 2.

Your music would need to be exported in ‘Native Format’ to the hard drives you will point the Roon core at. (This is the time consuming bit)

I exported mine to a drive in an ‘icy Box’ I think. I also initially ran Roon on a laptop with the ‘Icy box’ via USB 3. The icy box is cheap.

Perhaps you could just do this with part of your library as a trial. See what you think.
For myself, I invested in a QNAP NAS on an uninterrupted power supply, which is much quieter than my rack mount Twinstore. You will need advice on the best spec for your library size.
For control I use an Android tablet. I will get an iPad Air 2 in time. Older iPads don’t run the Roon Remote.
This will all be cheaper than your initial investment in Sooloos as costs have come down.

I can still run my Sooloos but I now use Roon exclusively.
Good luck, Chris

John,

I suspect the Twinstores could be used with Roon, as you can point to them using their IP addresses.

Personally I would look at using a QNAP or Synology NAS. If you got a more powerful one (ie Intel i5/i6 and lots of RAM) you could also use the NAS to run your Roon Core, killing two birds with one stone. I would look at a 4-bay NAS rather than a 2-bay one. You can store the Roon database on an SSD or fast USB attached to the NAS for extra speed.

When you do a native export from Sooloos keep a close check on how many albums are exported. There are tools (the Sooloos Library Interrogator, for example) that let you check there’s nothing missing.

I will have to try this as an experiment. The music will be in Sooloos format.
If you can do this successfully you wouldn’t need the export task?

The OP shows the importance of back up.

Personally I would only use this as a stopgap to doing a full native export. The idiots who developed Sooloos :grin: stored the music files with the metadata stored in sidecar files (I think). As such Roon will likely miss a few more albums than if it has the metadata to check against.

Thanks for responding.

I’m assuming you are suggesting a 4 bay unit for BU as well as storage. As I have several docking stations with Sata ports which can be used on my DV7 2112TX HP Notebook, I was thinking that one 6TB BU using this system would work so a 2 bay QNAP would suit.

But I see there are two models, and am unsure which would suit best. Would the QNAP TS-251+ 2-bay NAS be overkill?

So what do you suggest to attach for the Roon core?

The dollars are adding up but still well under the cost of a used C15 so the switch to Roon is a no brainer.

John

[quote=“dpstjp, post:7, topic:17464”]
Personally I would only use this as a stopgap to doing a full native export.
[/quote]I’d go further and say for a test ok if you have to … but it’s a really compromised setup … I tested Roon like this in the early days for a little while … the lack of metadata in the Sooloos ripped files compromised Roon’s identification hit rate.
So +100 on getting non-Sooloos storage (in my case a QNAP NAS TS870-Pro), performing a native export, and then pointing Roon at the export.

"“BU” = Backup?

No that’s a bad idea … as a NAS failure could trash all the disks.
A backup should be to a different device, ideally one that can be taken off-site.
I use a USB SATA HDD dock and just load bare drives into it, but USB 3 external HDD are also fine.

A NAS unit with say RAID 5 (or RAID 6) gives a degree of availability protection but is never a substitute to having a proper back. (in the IT world there a saying that data is not secure unless it is stored in 3 different places.)

No argument with me about that Carl.

A few months ago a nasty ransomware virus got into this PC via a “trusted” attachment and I would have lost all data on this PC without detached HDD BUs. Currently all Sooloos BUs are via a dock and I would certainly continue that practice with Roon.

Carl, you are a respected authority on all things computer so which particular NAS storage and which attached core item would you recommend for a 6TB system?

TIA

John

John, just an alt view. For just storage I probably would not add a NAS. The USB external devices are plenty good enough and flexible. Sounds like you are familiar with those already. NAS are quite expensive and have tons of functions you just won’t use. You are paying for those.

I think you mention you have a reasonable PC or mac now. I would start with that. It will mostly likely be more powerful than a NAS and be able to cope with more processing that Roon will may in future releases.

In Sooloos money that means you can get a new iPad and probably even a small NUC if you want a dedicated unit. Vs a C15 you still have change for a Vimto and bag of crisps.

Crack on with the export as that can take a few days even if the export behaves well.

John, a few general comments. I went through this same migration, although with a 10X smaller library.

I would recommend completely ignoring the Sooloos investment. I’m not being cavalier about money, but technology and prices improve at such a rapid pace that much better options are available. Hardware of course, but also Roon’s work on generality. Remember what we paid for the C10? And now an iPad is a much better control for one tenth the price.

Similarly for storage. I agree strongly with Nick: simplify, simplify, simplify. I installed 2.5 TB SSD in my NUC, sounds extravagant but the total cost is still $1300, a pittance in Meridian money. Simple and reliable. And I do not use RAID: RAID is primarily intended for business continuity, if a drive fails you can continue to operate your business while you replace the failed drive. Sounds good, but it does not provide good enough protection, you can lose the whole RAID drive or all its data to various calamities, such as fat-finger errors, massive hardware failures, bugs in disk drivers, theft, flood, fire… So you still need backup, and these days you should use offsite backup, i.e. cloud. And if you have cloud backup, a single SSD drive is very reliable. The backup is for extreme circumstances.

I aimed to make my NUC behave like a 1970s FM tuner, with a power button, self-starting and self-managing. Nearly achieved that – it’s Windows so it isn’t quite simple enough, I aim to replace it with a RoonOS box later.

(I have spent 40 years in the software industry, I can make these things work, but I don’t want to. Machines should not make demands on me, I make demands on the machines. Who runs this show anyway?)

I do have two MS600s, and I use them in two rooms but only because I almost never play music in those rooms. They work as well as they did with Sooloos, no complaints, but the cost of equivalent (nay, better!) functionality today is $500 - $1000 (e.g. Sonicorbiter or MicroRendu, plus an Audioquest Dragonfly). So if you have any kind of trouble with the Sooloos gear, write off the investment, you had years of pleasure with it, look forward to the new world.

Migrating the content is admittedly a huge hassle. I did what people suggest here, run a (long) export from Sooloos, and yes, I lost the Sooloos metadata edits. I found the pain wasn’t that huge because Roon is so much better at identifying the albums, I had a limited effort of fixing things. But my library is mostly jazz, classical fans in these pages are less happy with metadata and automatic identification. And your library is big. So it will be a pain. No magic answer.

My only practical advice is that looking back, most of my trouble came when I tried to be clever. Simple, straightforward setup and migration worked best.

Good luck.

Hi Nick

Thanks for the contact.

This PC has a C drive with 238GB SSD & 88.4 GB free - Windows 7 64 bit. It is very fast but I’m loathe to use it for the Roon core.

I have two HP notebooks with SSD C drives, one (64 bit) only has a 129 GB SSD while the other (32 bit) has a 250 GB SSD with 64GB free. Each of them has a 2.66GHZ P8800 Core2Duo processor with 4 GB of RAM.

Could the Notebook with 64BIT Windows & the 120GB SSD be used for the Roon core? I could free up the SSD so only Malwarebytes and Virus protection was still on board. I rarely use it so deleting WORD etc. is no problem but would it be fast enough?

Your suggestion about using the dock is appealing as it can link to the notebook by eSATA. I’m all too familiar with how many days downloads and backups can take so I’ll live with that!! Probably no faster with a NAS unit anyway.

TIA
John

Hi Anders

Thanks for the input. The KISS principle is certainly the best as I have found time & time again.

What do you think about using the W7 64 bit/120GB SSD notebook as the core? If that would work the change over to Roon will be at minimal cost.

Pity I spent those dollars on the 2TB & 4TB HDDS for the twinstores but I guess they will find a home somewhere here as HDDs die in their old age.

And your comment about the illusion of a RAID system being any protection has been verified here this month when BOTH 2TB Seagate Constellation drives failed.

John

Hi John,

Welcome to the Forum, and possibly to Roon. Others are better placed to respond to your Sooloos/Roon queries. One note I would make about Classical in Roon is that it is getting an extensive revamp in Roon 1.3. The current well-founded criticisms of Classical and Works will soon need to consider the forthcoming changes. There is no need to delay any conversion or subsequent Roon edits until after 1.3, the database changes will preserve any existing edits.

It’s too soon to know yet whether the 1.3 changes will resolve users issues with Classical; it may be that your feedback will assist in judging that once it is released. The developers (devs) are committed to getting Classical “right” and also have Jazz in their sights.

That raises the natural question: when will 1.3 be released ? I’m afraid the answer is “don’t know, but soon”. The trouble with fixing a date is that testing often throws up issues where the solution requires further testing. All I can say is that the devs are as highly motivated to getting it right and then getting it shipped as anyone.

I think using an existing laptop for Roon is reasonable: it minimizes cost and the effort of managing that laptop is not additive, since you presumably need the laptop for other purposes and hence need it anyway.

However, I originally put Roon on an existing desktop with the same reasoning, but ifound that the complex workloads on that machine sometimes interfered with the music: photo editing and graphics creation, photo quality printing, backup of not just itself but other machines in the house. It isn’t that a PC can’t multitask, but nonetheless the failure rate was higher than acceptable for a music appliance. If nothing else, I found I was futzing a lot with the machine, NAS and network and that futzing interfered with music. Shouldn’t, my fault, but it is reality.

So one reasonable path is to install Roon at minimal cost, with the laptop and existing MS600 and USB storage, with the plan to move to dedicated, simplified Roon appliances once you are convinced Roon is for you.

But that two-stage migration is extra work. Not double the work, of course, but still. If you are convinced Roon is right for you (and I am) I would make the straight bet to the final destination.

I would have saved money and effort and time by following this advice.

(I have worked for 45 years in the computer industry, until my recent retirement in Microsoft on operating systems and cloud. But today I am a fierce advocate of minimalistic single-function devices. The general-purpose computer is a magical invention that revolutionized economics, but its complexity belongs to the past. With the drastic improvements in price performance, we can now build single-purpose devices instead. This disruption will upend the business models of the industry, but it is the right way and inevitable. You may not be interested in leading the computer industry disruption, just want a music experience, but when we see the future we might as well get on board.)

Thanks Anders & everyone.

I have ordered and paid for two 6 TB WD HDDs, one for Roon music files and the other for BU.

I will clean out the unused laptop of WORD and other programs to free up C drive space and, when the 6 TB HDDs land go through the painful week long exercise of downloading FLAC etc files onto it ready for Roon.

Hopefully by then Roon 1.3 will be released. Not sure I fully comprehend the improvement being offered with classical albums - it looks as if editing done for Sooloos might be preserved but I cannot see that happening for all aspects as much (e.g tags, reviews) is lost on export is it not?

One last general question: Does Roon have a built in mechanism to alert the user of HDD problems? The lack of this with Sooloos/twinstores is irksome as I naively understood years ago there was such a warning in the Meridian software. Maybe there was 6 years ago but has been lost along the way with the many updates. Anyway if Roon is as good as is penned here I’ll be a happy camper to say goodbye to Sooloos.

Bottom line I’ll soon be on board Roon and be able to say goodbye to Sooloos hassles.

Details haven’t been announced yet, so I’m being deliberately vague. What I meant to convey is that editing in Roon will be preserved from 1.2 to 1.3. I believe that editing,tags etc. in Sooloos are lost on import to Roon.[quote=“JOHN_COULSON, post:18, topic:17464”]
One last general question: Does Roon have a built in mechanism to alert the user of HDD problems?
[/quote]

Sadly, no. I’m not sure if this is feasible given the cross-platform nature of Roon. Distinguishing an HDD fail from a Network issue would also seem difficult.

SSDs are great for Roon. The database should definitely be on one, and moving your music library eventually to SSD Is also good. You can do this gradually, shifting more frequently played music to SSD and leaving other albums on HDD; Roon presents all music in folders it is watching in the one UI.

Thanks for the comment Andy.

I’ve changed my mind about the core and see it as silly to use the slower Notebook when this ASUS Z87 PRO motherboard could handle Roon as well as normal undemanding PC work. Any more demanding graphics work on this PC is unlikely to be done when there are Roon PC requirements.

And this would be keeping to the KISS principle suggested by Nick. This PC is kept on 24/7, has extensive Malwarebytes etc protection software installed, so is the obvious choice with its 250GB SSD (currently over 90GB to spare). A USB3 docking station with the 6TB of music files on board can be hidden in the corner under the desk and out of sight. And the power usage will be far less than the C10/twinstores combo.

But I will not put any music files on the SSD - as I understand it from posts here there is no advantage in that data handling over USB3 will be sufficient. Correct??

One downside I can see for me in the change is the loss of considerable editing done on the album covers, many of which have been massage and changed by me with added graphics over the last 6 years. The other editing on classical albums has been the laborious change of titles to show COMPOSER surname first in the title of albums totally from the one person. But, as I understand it, Roon deals with albums having mixed composers far better than can be organised on Sooloos so it is a swings and roundabouts situation.

I saw a comment here that Roon (like Sooloos) is not so great on classical albums, something Roon 1.3 will address, but would appreciate any info or links anyone can give about this.

Thanks again to everyone for input. This site looks a friendly and helpful place, a nice contrast to some others.

John