Beachball on a Macbook Pro: Roon churns continuously

Support
1

I installed Roon about 10 days ago, and it still seems to be processing my rather large library (17,000+ songs). Since build 88, I am having even more issues. I get a pretty much continuous beach ball and no updating of the now-playing window on the main machine or the remote iPad. I am unable to click on any Roon menus because it’s busy. When I do Cmd/Shift/ Esc the Mac says Roon is not responding.

I tried restarting the Mac
I tried shutting down the iPad.
I tried reinstalling Roon

Setup (a rather old machine, but it runs all other players without difficulty, including iTunes, PureMusic, JRiver, Amarra…):
Macbook Pro (mid-2009 build)
2.53 Ghz Core 2
4GB RAM
Library on an external disk

2

Oh, and one more thing: It does keep playing the music.

3

Is the ‘spinner’ (spinning circle) still active top right in your Roon window? Could you click on it and tell us the status?

Your MacBook may not be the youngest, but I’ve seen Core 2 Macs run Roon without breaking much sweat after initialisation, and 17.000 tracks is really not such a large library in Roon-land…

My guess would be that Roon’s audio analysis is still taking place in the background and stalling your MacBook. You could try setting ‘Background Audio Analysis Speed’ (Settings > Setup) to High temporarily and leave your MacBook running overnight until it is finished.

Otherwise, the analysis process could have encountered some rogue files in your library and gotten stuck, but let’s take it one step at a time.

4

The spinner is still active. It says File copying complete and “of 8836 tracks, 0 added, 0 identified.”

There are about 100 dsf files in my library, if that might be an issue. They were added to iTunes by PureMusic.

A little more on setup: Running OSX 10.11.2. Have a Mytek Digital DSD DAC running via Firewire and the external disk running via USB.

5

Hey @David_Carlson – we’ve heard from a few people about problems with PureMusic’s “bookmarks” – any chance Roon is encountering files that aren’t actually the right media?

Are you using a watched folder, or is your content being imported via iTunes?

6

I am using a watched folder, and it is possible Roon is encountering PureMusic bookmarks. Is there another way to import the dsf files in to Roon, perhaps place them in their own watched folder?

7

I think what’s causing issues here is probably the PureMusic bookmarks – I haven’t actually used these myself, but as I understand it, the problematic files are .pmbmf files. Without those in your watched folders, I’d guess you’ll be all set.

Are you looking to continue using PureMusic? Deleting the .pmbmf files would probably work for Roon, but might cause issues for PureMusic, so let me know your plan here and I can look into this further.

Thanks!

8

Thanks, Mike. I honestly haven’t decided if I will continue using PM. If I get better fidelity with Roon, I will abandon PM for a life subscription. If not, I’ll stick with PM.

9

Well, I signed up for a lifetime, so I hope we can figure this out. I copied all of my dsf albums to another directory, deleted all the .pmbmf files, told Roon to stop watching the old directory and start watching the new one and restarted the program. It is now stuck on analyzing 1/35717.

I tried telling it to rescan the folders and left it to run all night – still 1/35717.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

–dave

10

Hey @David_Carlson – sorry for the slow response here and Happy New Year! :tada:

I’m going to follow up via PM a little later today, and we’ll get some logs from you. I’m sure we can figure out what’s going on here.

Stand by!