I looked through several posts and I am still confused I have Roon core on my Macbook and I listen mainly to headphones through a USB dac and I have HQplayer installed locally.
I am running out of room on my Macbook- I was thinking of making my Imac the core and connecting remotely but I read somewhere that by doing this I would be simply streaming the audio on my remote - I don’t want this since I want to keep hq player local and I want Hi Rez
So should I keep my core on my laptop put music files on the Imac and connect them as library or am I better switching my core and going remote.
The music library can be local to the Core (local / USB disk) or any device on your LAN that support SMB sharing that can be seen by the Core.
Similarly, HQP can be on the same PC as the Core or any other PC that connected to you LAN that the Core can see.
So the Lib, Core and HQP could all be on the same PC or all on different PCs.
I think in your case your looking at something like this:
Lib and Core on your iMac … and … HQP (and your DAC) on the MacBook.
Plus you will want Roon Remote on the MacBook as well so you can control the Roon Core.
Hope that helps.
PS You might also wish to consider running RoonServer (no GUI) on the iMac if you wish.
In case your iMac is significantly faster than your MacBook, you could run HQ Player on the iMac as well, and run NAA (Network Audio Adapter) on your MacBook so it will not have to perform any DSP processing but just receives the upsampled audio.
So I checked the Imac, it is old 3.2 ghz i3 with a wired connection to my internet router (for Tidal posibly) and it has 1.1 TB of free disk space for my library, I rarely use it.
The Macbook 2.5 ghz i5 connected via wireless with about 2 GB free disk space for my library - I have Squeezebox running on a linux server connected to my stereo/Home Theater - haven’t connected Roon yet.
If I went all Roon I might want to run it from the Imac - really more concerned with the laptop since I do most of my listening now with headphones. What is NAA I haven’t heard of that?
May listen on the road some but Tidal might be enough for that
So I’m still confused - I’m thinking Imac core and laptop remote - and maybe make laptop core on the road -