My music library is on a Synology NAS that I connect to my Macbook through SMB (but, until now with a dynamically assigned IP address). Every time the IP address is changed, Roon restarts the audio analysis on my files. This typically takes almost two weeks to complete (even at the fast speed).
I have hopefully now fixed part of the problem by assigning the NAS a fixed IP address, by I’m wondering if there is any way to avoid having to redo the full audio analysis yet again.
Any thoughts?
@sdolezalek , are you running Roon 1.1 (Build 69) ? If not pleasse try the latest build as it includes enhancements to be able to identify your files regardless of where they’re located/ moved to.
Yes, I’m running 1.1 (build 69). Under “Storage” it shows the prior NAS location (but I get an error message 68 that it cannot connect), so that one is now disabled as a watched folder. The new NAS folder (with fixed IP) is the current watched folder. It was quickly indexed (845 albums) but is still very slowly going through the audio analysis.
The other thing I have noticed, is that even after running the audio analysis, if the NAS server was disconnected from my Macbook for any reason, when it was reattached, all of my files were re-indexed and showed up as “New” every time I reconnected. That was annoying, but didn’t interfere with my listening. However, when the computer is running audio analysis, it takes up too much of the processor, so I cannot listen to high res files until the analysis is finished.
When my Mac mini is going to sleep it will rescan after wakeup. When you set ‘go to sleep’ to never it will not rescan your files. So you can put only your screen going to sleep.
Pieter
Hi Stephen,
It’s great your now running the new v1.1 build 69 now, but I think most of your experience will be running older builds. I would recommend letting build 69 complete the audio analysis and then once finished, compare how it now behaves.
The audio analysis taking weeks is very odd, can you provide a little more information to help understand what’s going on here:
How many tracks are in your collection?
What is the spec of your MacBook?
Is your MacBook hard-wired to the LAN?
What is the spec of your NAS?
Is your NAS hard-wired to the LAN?
Is your hardwired LAN 1GB?
What Wifi access point are you using?
Regards,
Carl
PS
I always assign servers and NAS etc. static IP addresses (in fact I do this for all my hardwired devices).
I tend to use DHCP to manage this by reserving IPs against MAC addresses … however, others prefer to set each unit to use a fixed IP. There are pros and cons of both methods.
Thanks Carl. There are 11,000 tracks in my collection. The MacBook is as follows:
MacBook Air (13-inch, Late 2010)
2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
The MacBook is hardwired to the LAN when it does the audio analysis and when playing Roon, but otherwise is on WiFi during the day.
The NAS is a Synology DS415+ with 16 Terabytes of storage
Although the LAN and my switch and router are 1GB and most cabling is Cat 7, there is some Cat 5e wiring in the system which may slow things a bit. The WiFi access points are all Apple’s latest Airport Extremes.
I changed the sleep settings on the MacBook to prevent anything but the screen from going to sleep and that seems to be helping, but it looks as though it will still take 5-6 days for the audio analysis to run.
Stephan
Hi again,
Thanks for extra info, it all seems to be in order. The MacBook’s not the fastest of laptops and 4GB RAM is a bit light so that might be limitation but it should not take weeks to complete the audio analysis of 11K tracks.
One more thing to check after that I think we will need to get one of developers to take a look.
In Roon’s settings --> setup tab … can you make sure that audio analysis speed is set to fast (it a trade off time vs. taking up a lot a CPU recourses).
Hey @sdolezalek – thanks for reporting this, and sorry for what sounds like a frustrating experience.
To be clear, audio analysis is needed to enable waveform display, crossfading, and volume normalization, but it can be shut off completely if these features aren’t important to you. It can also be set to Normal to minimize its effect on your CPU.
Audio analysis is different from the audio extraction process that happens when you import new music (or to your whole collection when you update to Build 69). The extraction process is much faster, and is denoted by the spinner displayed in the top-right, near Bookmarks and Search.
Reading this thread, my best guess is that most of these issues were tied to your NAS drive’s dynamic IP – when the address changed and you re-added the NAS with its new IP, I suspect that Roon did not have a good way to know these were the same files, and I could see that triggering a new round of analysis.
As @Carl mentioned, starting in Build 69, we will be tracking your files based on their audio content, and combined with the static IP address for your NAS, I’m guessing your files will be successfully tracked going forward. While you’ll have to wait out one last round of analysis, after that this issue should be behind you.
My recommendation @sdolezalek would be to take an occasional look at the analysis process over the next couple of days and confirm that it’s working it’s way through your collection. If it gets stuck, or if it appears to be starting over again, let me know and we’ll take another look at this internally to see if we can reproduce the behavior, and to ensure that files are only analyzed when necessary.
One more gotcha: A 2010 MacBook Air that is ‘hardwired to the LAN’ is in al likeliness using the 10/100 Ethernet adaptor, connecting through USB and notoriously slow. This is probably a bottleneck.
Thanks Mike. I think you are correct and the analysis is proceeding well, albeit slowly. Rene is probably also correct that my 10/100 adaptor and USB is a bottleneck (perhaps also on playback of DSD256 and 24/192 or higher PCM files). I have been waiting too see whether you progress with an HQPlayer integration to switch from the MAC to a dedicated Windows headless machine with adequate CPU/RAM/HDD to run both roon effectively and do real-time upsampling in HQP.