I’m currently running ROON Server on a Synology DS220+ NAS and to be honest it works fairly well. I use ROON predominantly for streaming from Qobuz (wired) and have a handful of FLAC albums on the same NAS and no intentions to expand that library.
Nevertheless I’d like to build a dedicated ROON server solution and I’m in doubt for the Nucleus One, a MacMini or a NUC, albeit with ROCK or Win/Ubuntu. I understand the One is easiest but also limited. What are the specs anyway?
Any insights especially why to choose for either the OS/Server vs ROCK vs MacOS would be highly appreciated!
Really depends on what you want from it. Buying Nucleus your paying for the fancy case and help fund RoonOS, hardware wise it’s less than stellar pc. You can buy similar hardware or way better for same price, whilst the Rock version of RoonOs is only officially supported on some Intel Nucs it can be installed on other systems and works, as long as it’s intel based hardware. RoonOS is totally locked down and does one thing run Roon. I used to use it but moved a way from single purpose usage and wanted to monitor what’s going on so now run Dietpi which works just as well and I can have other server software running rather than have multiple machines.
I haven’t found Roon runs any better on dedicated server, some will say it’s fit and forget with RoonOS but it’s just as prone to have the same issues as other operating systems. Roon is Roon and has tendencies to run wild at times on any platform.
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Thank you for this! I feel a lot for a Mac Mini or Linux-based. Not a big fan of Win-based machines for ‘hands-off’ applications i.e. 24/7 runtimes. I’ll sleep it over but a OS-based (vs ROCK-based) solution is most likely to be it.
I think the current Mac Minis give a big bang to buck, you get well made hardware to boot. But recent Os upgrade has had its share of issues with Roon and other software.
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Unlike @CrystalGipsy (and others), I prefer the “music appliance” approach of a ROCK/NUC. Originally I used a NUC running Windows to host my Roon Server, but when Roon Labs released ROCK, I installed that and never looked back.
I must say that apart from a weird file system issue that occurred years ago, RoonOS has just worked for me, but then my library is not overly large or complex: 3,400 albums, 70,300 tracks, 2,800 artists and 1,000 classical composers…
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I run Roon on a Synoloy, too, and will keep it there for a foreseeable future. But if I were building a dedicated (or semi-dedicated) server I would go for a general-purpose OS with Roon Server on it. Far more flexible (both for hardware and the software you might want to put on it), and you get working monitoring and management tools.
I have Windows servers staying up for months on end with no issues, but unless you need to be able to connect some fancy DAC that needs Windows-only drivers directly to it anything that Roon can run under would work the same…
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It’s not really a Win machine any longer if it’s running Rock.