Audio Analysis Very, Very Slow, and Value With On-Demand Analysis?

Roon Software Discussion
1

I’m running Roon on a Synology DS218+ with 8GB RAM and with the Roon DB on a 256GB USB SSD. All is working really well, no performance issues at all when streaming music from the NAS, Tidal, or Live Radio (ie no skipping as some others have reported on the same hardware). I have relatively small library of about 3k albums/42k tracks (of different media types and resolutions) and my Roon DB is about 4.5GB. The first week on the NAS was amazing, everything was impressively smooth.

A week in, though, and I was diagnosing latency issues with clients rendering changes – the Roon client on my Mac was taking forever, around 30 seconds, to change screens when clicking on different categories in the left nav, like viewing Albums and then clicking on Artists, or when opening albums from within an Artist screen – and I think I’ve narrowed it down to the Background Audio Analysis process, and that opened two questions:

  • The analysis process is extremely slow, like analyzing one or two songs per minute. Is this normal? After a week I’m at about 30% through the library. Even when I set it to Fast (1 core) it’s the same speed as Throttled. On one hand it’s a new library so I’d love to just burn through all of the analysis to get the library full analyzed. On the other, though, it is a Synology 218+ so I appreciate that it’s not a high-powered machine and it is affecting normal client usage. But that speed seems very slow.

  • Is there any down side to stopping the background analyzing process and just relying on On-Demand Audio analysis, letting Roon handle it when I play each album for the first time? I would be OK with this route but I haven’t tested it and I can’t really find much about it online (beyond some very specific issues with corrupt files).

So I’m curious if there are any best practices and/or hard and fast rules about letting analysis just run for days/weeks (due to how long it takes) and me sucking up the client GUI latency until it finishes, or killing the background process for good and just relying on On-Demand.

Any thoughts/guidance/suggestions? Thx!

2

It’s taking a long time as it takes 30% of one core to do the analysis. If you do on demand then it takes 100% of one core when it does it.

3

When you say core do you mean 30% of a Roon Core or 30% of a CPU core? Not that it really makes a difference in the answer, just curious. :slight_smile:

And thanks for the details! The 100% when on demand was what I was looking for.

4

CPU core. :slight_smile:

5

You have a couple options.
First, try it and see how quickly this actually happens and if it affects the tracks being played while this takes place. It might hamper some aspect of your Roon experience, like laggy browsing. Then that’s not a good choice.
Second, the actual benefits of the audio analysis are not exactly overwhelming. If you don’t mind not having the squiggly amplitude graphic and don’t use some of the related DSP functions, you won’t miss not having those data. So your choice there is to just turn of the analysis when you are using the Roon interface and turn it back on when you’re not. The instances of you not having the audio analyses will decrease as your library is analyzed.

6

Thanks @ged_hickman1, good to know.

And thanks @grossmsj, that’s a great suggestion. Never thought of turning it on and off and makes total sense.