After a longer period of absence, i’d love to give the new Roon another test-swing. First glance is mighty impressive, very very nice on the eyes, and very smooth sailing with the tracks that are already indexed.
But:
From earlier experience I’ve learned that my NAs, albeit capable of serving Roon, isn’t very adequate. Therefor i tried and installed Roon on my I7 MacBook air with ssd drive. Which should be adequate, shouldn’t it?
Ive pointed it to 3 folders on my Nas. Indexing my files went alright, though not too fast. Importing all the tracks is like being back in Memory Lane: very very slow…
I therefor connected a USB3 drive to my MB Air, to see if that would improve things. Tracks were found very quickly indeed. Importing them takes just as forever…
I’ll be patient for now, but would like to ask you 2 things:
Does this sound familiar cq is this expected behavior?
Is there anything i could try in settings somewhere, that would/could speedup importing the tracks. (maybe adding only one folder at a time? just trying here)?
The initial audio analysis can take a long time. You can go to Settings/Library and 1. Turn the background audio analysis off, OR 2.Devote more CPU cores to the analysis. Many people, turn off the audio analysis while using Roon, and then turn it on overnight.
Just to be precise: im not talking about the background analysis which one can set in the Settings/Library, but about the 'Adding music to your library" one can reach clicking the moving circle in the top right window.
Or do you mean that before everything is added to the library, i should turn off the background analysis?
I always presumed the ‘Importing’ step would be fairly slow as I assume that is the bit that looks up the albums in the online databases, matches them and downloads all the metadata. If that is the case, it is never going to be anywhere near as fast as scanning a NAS can be.
Even with several hundred thousand tracks though, you will still be done in a day so why is it an issue for you?
My hardware is a Macbook Air 1,7ghz, score I7, 8gb 1600hz, 250SSD. My Nas is a Synology 1512+. Roon DB therefor located on SSD, library 100k+.
Importing was 1 or 2 tracks per minute. But i think I’ve solved that. Ive disabled background analysis for the time being and all of a sudden, all tracks are scanned and imported. Took me 2 full days, and i think the importing has finished.
Not 100% sure though, since Ive had to force rescan several times. Roon hasn’t finished that proces as i write this, so ill wait and see.
My original question was if it was to be expected that importing music from a NAS (and not an ultimate speed warrior to that either) would have been as fast as importing from a directly hooked up USB 3 drive.
Not sure i understand @Anthony_B here , are you saying scanning a NAS should be much faster? That would strike me as strange, since looking extra stuff on the internet would be as fast for both situations (NAS and USB drive). Its the adding to the Roon DB that would make the difference
Hi,
apologies for any misunderstanding. All things being equal (everything wired, no wifi) scanning an attached USB drive should be quicker than scanning a NAS over your LAN.
The importing bit should be the same timewise whatever the source of the tracks I would have thought. However, from what I remember, Roon interleaves scanning and importing when scanning multiple watched folders (may have remembered that wrong), which is why I think best practice (read it on here somewhere) is to scan one folder at a time. By the time scanning has finished, the importing will be lagging behind. No idea what the expected import/minute rate should be but I am certain it has been mentioned somewhere on the forum. But as you have found, your hardware can make a considerable difference to this rate (and please do not take this the wrong way but Macbook Airs are not exactly known for their performance).