OK is there going to be a training camp for us poor souls? A week in some resort talking about Roon and never saying the word “Core”? Sounds like a drinking game in the making to me!
Seriously, this is a super smart move. Roon Server running with a separate GUI in the full app had to work anyway already and was superior, so the full app arguably was just ballast that confused things. I didn’t see it all these years, in hindsight it is obvious. Kudos for realizing this!
Sorry, while I was waiting for Database update this latest build involving, I was re-reading the Release Notes for Roon Server but also those for RoonOS B259.
Also was interesting, is that for some reason my NUC running RoonOS has been running B259 for just over 2 days, but it was only released today.
Ever since, I let my fanless-desktop-CPU Windows music-server auto-login and auto-start Roon Server into the system tray with additionally auto-starting the GUI to use my Flirc and All4one Streamer remote - first with Win10 then Win11.
Start-up time around 45 seconds and shutting it down whenever leaving the house or done for the day.
Always found it to work more reliably - there were instances with certain releases in the past, where the GUI crashed every once in a while, but here, music of course continued…
Yay. I have been advocating for and using this setup since… the beginning!
I have had to defend why I had chose to do this since the beginning; especially when I’ve suggested it as a resolution to some problems. Over the years, I have probably written hundreds of post talking about the hows and whys of setting Roon up this way on a Windows PC.
You could have always done this. This just simplifies the setup for some users.
Yes someone else mentioned this in Roon Software Discussion as well. I am pretty sure mine was on 258 when I had that spurious update prompt a few days ago, because I checked. Now I got the update to 259 when I checked for it after seeing the release notes, but I didn’t reboot in recent days so I don’t know what would have happened
I did understand the benefits all along, what I didn’t see was the genius move to simply kill the all-in-one app and making the server install automatic. If you advocated for this, kudos to you too
Now it’s just like Microsoft Teams - when you close the Teams GUI, the server component just carries on in the background as well…
And like Teams, Roon is presumably still not a Windows Service, so you still need to kick it off by signing in to Windows and opening Roon, because it runs in user space… So auto-logins on headless Windows Servers are still needed?
This is a really smart change. It’s good for users and simplifies the deployment and test matrices for Roon engineers.
I’m sure this will be contentious but I’d like to see Roon push even further in the direction of simplification. My proposal, which I think I’ve made elsewhere in the past, is that Roon drop support for standalone Linux and NAS installations. Instead, support a ROCK image for Docker. Let the community provide instructions, walkthrough, etc. People have asserted that Docker is too resource intensive. In my opinion, this simply means that users either need to buy NAS devices with enough horsepower or they should buy a suitable Nucleus or NUC device.
Personally, I’d love the option of running ROCK in a Docker container and would love to see it supported via this approach. Just my two cents.
I guess this is only if you are on prod…my EA rock / rok / ross are all still on 257 and I guess there will maybe a new AE or maybe the pro is now the EA equivalent
“Roon Server” makes a lot more sense to me too. Unfortunately the term “server” has become ambiguous and abused by the audio industry. Often “music server” is really just a player. But I’m fully on board with calling the application formerly known as Roon Core a server–an alternative to “Logitech Media Server” (which I also still use, incidentally, mostly as an alarm clock. I can’t see wasting the displays of my multiple generations of Squeezeboxes by turning them into Roon end points). No retraining camp necessary for me.
Great idea really, especially for Windows machines! I’ve been wondering why they didn’t do this from the onset myself as I’m a 26yr IT veteran. It just seemed like it could benefit performance wise as well as stability wise from being a background service (server) rather an all in one app.
Now, quick question. Will the new 1310 version install over the current 1303 just as before and walla it’s now in server mode and will not have the app pop up? I’m thinking about moving forward with this great idea now!
