I have over 700,000 track in my Roon library, when Roon is working well having a large library like this is fantastic using Roon’s music discovery attributes.
Unfortunately my Nucleus+ with 32Gb Ram doesn’t provide a great Roon experience.
I have an internal 4TB SSD for some of my music files and the rest on an external drive.
I love the Roon software but slowdowns, sluggish performance and crashes makes using Roon very frustrating.
I tried switching the core to my to my Mac mini (2018) 3.2 GHz 6-core i7 and found Roon to be quite faster. As this is my main machine (apart from my 2015 MacBook Pro) I couldn’t use it solely for Roon.
I’m looking for an affordable alternative (say $500A) that won’t choke with my large library.
Does anyone have a similar sized library with a success story and suggestions?
Maybe a big noisy desktop hidden in a cupboard ? 700k tracks is a big library.
I used my i7 7700 desktop with 16 Gb for a long time with no issues, obviously there are bigger and better processors around and I would certainly go 32gb
The downside is the noise but if you can isolate it , mine was in the study nowhere near the listening room, its a good solution
FWIW, I’ve just set up Roon on a Intel NUC 13 Pro NUC13ANHi7 (12 core, 13 gen) running ROCK with a 250GB SSD. I started with the recommended 8GB of memory, and everything was sluggish with dropouts, and loss of server comm, etc. (even after 2 weeks - I don’t think it wasn’t just initial indexing load) So, I upgraded to 16GB, and eventually got to 32GB before things began to run somewhat smoothly. So, for a large library 64GB might be the best recommendation, at least in this application. Also an i7 level processor seems to be a good recommendation for a large library.
Just before Xmas I blew a whole pile of cash and bought an Apple Mac mini M4 pro with 64GB memory and a 2TB SSD for my Roon core. None of my music is on the internal SSD. I have 735,000 tracks which reside on a Oyen 20TB Novus USB-C external drive. Finally I have a Roon system for my large library which (usually) works without stalling and making searching painfully slow. I believe that when I can afford a faster internet service that my current 48Mbps/1, Roon will behave flawlessly.
What isn’t really, the servers over that price at least tend to have more custom parts and better quality components but are all firmly in Audiophile La La land.
I’m currently on my 4th Roon Server. I went from a 2017 MacBook Air, to a 2014 MacMini, 2020 M1 MacBook Pro to my current Lenovo laptop.
All the Mac’s came with 8 gb of RAM and my Lenovo has 16 gb. My current library sits at just over 88k tracks/7.5k albums. The 16 gb of RAM in the Lenovo really makes the Roon experience a much smoother experience. It is running Linux as its OS and has an 8th gen i7 quad core CPU installed.
RAM seems to have a bigger impact on performance compared to which CPU is installed. As the Air and Mini both had i5 CPU’s installed. And for normal playback there were 0 performance issues when it came to playing music.
Sure wish a little more of this info had been in the instructions for ROCK, it would certainly have allowed me to make better choices/purchases initially and left me with a far better impression of Roon’s functionality in general.
There are even more subtleties involved. How you have organized your library, and/or, the actual content of your library can affect performance and add to required resources.
I run a 330K track library for a few years now on ROCK/MOCK on an ASRock mobo with fanless chassis and LMPS using an i7 10700 cpu with 32GB - same setup as was using Windows 10 prior to windows OS build crashing beyond recovery. its been rock solid.
My library is the same size and I’m using the Nucleus + with 32 RAM and I re-booted it last night after Roon was sluggish and it’s snapped to attention [not sure for how long]