Anyone successfully run a Mele Quieter3c/3q with :
- ROCK installed on built in eMMC SSD
- Roon library on additional NVME SSD
- Streaming via network to a streaming DAC - i.e. audio over network, not via HDMI or USB outputs
- ROCK installed on built in eMMC SSD - It seems that this is not possible, the eMMC SSD isnât supported/recognized
- Roon library on additional NVME SSD - As the M.2 NVME SSD is the only supported/recognized drive, ROCK OS must be installed on this drive and the library has to be on another drive.
- Streaming via network to a streaming DAC - i.e. audio over network, not via HDMI or USB outputs - I havenât tried this, but the HDMI outputs arenât supported/recognized. (Audio over network to another Roon endpoint? That will work.)
As mentioned previously, I have not tried ROCK as I want full control over the OS. However, Debian + Roon Server installed on an SSD works like a charm, including network streaming.
Btw donât want to trigger a Linux flavour discussion. I prefer Debian (+ Liquorix kernel) because of the lower number of services/background tasks, fastest measured performance, and lowest latency compared to some other Linux distroâs. And Debian CAN be installed without a desktop UI.
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ROCK can only install via a SATA or NVME interface. It wonât see eMMC.
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This is true.
A Linux minimal server distro with Roon server gave me a good end result in performance for my simple setup. As per my screenshots earlier in this thread, the performance wasnât horrendous with various DSP being enabled.
On occasion I have seen my Roon Remote app on both iPhone and Android phone being a little sluggish with my MeLe Q3q. But again not horrendous.
YMMV
Running ROCK on Quieter3C 82E with 250GB Samsung 980. Works very well. Be sure to install the thermal pad with the NVME.
As others have noted, audio devices and internal eMMC are unavailable, but unnecessary when utilizing as a core server with NVME, which is the preferred config for speed regardless, and with another device acting as a Roon Ready endpoint.
Was procrastinating, after having been disappointed with the Roon 2.0 update crashing my trusty old mac mini (yes, I was one of the idiots that hit âUpdateâ, without reading), and living with 1.8 Legacy for awhile. Almost dropped way too much cash on a Nucleus and instead decided to take the risk with the Quieter3C, and figured, if it didnât work, could use it for any number of other tasks (itâs better than a pi). Completely satisfied with the experiment. Loaded and launched ROCK without incident and was up and running with a restored backup in minutesâŚyes, minutes (maybe 10 max, including me mucking about in the bios; qualifying statement: I have a small library ~1000 albums). Almost couldnât believe it. Now enjoying Roon 2.0 and ARC goodness. Thought for sure, Iâd get some weird dropouts or clicks or some stupid nonsense (library sits on a NAS), but nope. All good.
Remember though, must have NVME (donât forget the thermal pad!) and cannot be used as endpoint (at least in default config).
As an aside, itâs stupid small. My son asked where the new computer was. I pointed at the tiny black slabâŚhe laughed and said I was full of crap.
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thanks for yourâe detailed tutorial. Today i received my 3Q, build in a 1TB nvme and followed your steps to install debian with the liquorix kernel and roonserver. All ent well, i just had to install a ffmpeg and a unzip library then roonserver was ready.
Now my question is: Can i start this minipc from time to time with the installed windows 11 pro or will windows mess with my carefully installed linux on the nvme ssd? Also i must see how i can best utilize the 1TB nvme since linux didnât use that much of this drive. My musicfiles will be on a separate 4TB Sandisk SSD which is connected via USB 3. Maybe i will also add another 5TB 2,5" HD which i have lying around as backup.
Players are connected via a Pi4 with rooExtend, only a creative Bluetooth DAC BT-W4 will be connected on the roonserver.
From my own experience with an earlier model, booting to Windows depends on how you set your boot priority. You can change it back to placing the eMMC higher then going back to NVMe after. It is a bit fiddly but it works. The NUCs had a âone time onlyâ option to choose your boot disk, canât remember if it was F2 or F10 but Iâve not found that on the MeLE machine I have.
I think itâs F8 on the MeLE (for one time boot).
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You can still boot from Win11. You will probably have to hit F7 while booting, to select the eMMC as boot drive. Other then thatâŚno issues/worries.
Update: when doing Windows update, the OS will make sure to reboot into Win11, regardless of the predefined boot-order.
Hi all whatâs the difference between the C and Q version? Just different ports?
Specs suggest the win11 pro license comes with the unit? is this correct?
I am considering grabbing one, and maintaining Win11 which would allow me to run my DAC with its native ASIO driver.
Another decent option for a Win11 end point is:
The case at face value, appears to have much better thermal cooling.
I installed and tested roon core using three operating systems on the Quieter 3C configured with 8GB RAM and the 256GB eMMC âdisk driveâ option
Win11: core installs and runs on eMMC like any other windows apps.
ROCK: requires an M.2 SSD; installation image doesnât detect the eMMC
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: OS and roon install and run on eMMC like any other linux apps.
I did a test that loaded/cataloged 20,000 albums under Ubuntu. Cataloging slowed to a crawl at around 10,000 albums. Both RAM (8GB) and swap (2GB) became full. I added an (unnecessarily large) 20GB swap file and the cataloging ran at full speed until completion. I think I would have been good adding another 4GB of swap for this collection.
ROCK would have the same problem, and since it is locked down, a user wouldnât be able to increase swap. And to repeat, since it is locked down, we canât know in advance if the swap file would be large enough to handle a collection this large, or if roon will detect the memory issue and increase swap on itâs own.
Regarding performance, roon on Ubuntu (with eMMC only) used about 1% cpu on this four core Celeron (without hyperthreading) N5105 machine during playback with DSP upsampling enabled. During cataloging, it did about 600 tracks a minute and 75-100% CPU utilization when audio analysis was turned on, and about 1000 tracks a minute with 20% CPU utilization after turning off audio analysis.
roon on Ubuntu using an M.2 SSD would most likely run even faster. I benchmarked the eMMC âdisk driveâ at about 250MB/s, which is about as fast as a good SATA III mechanical hard drive. I didnât benchmark the SSD, but it should be about 10-20x faster unless the Quieter PC manufacturer botched something. FYI, linux sees the eMMC as an SD card according to the driver that itâs assigned to. Yes, it thinks itâs one of those little micro sim-type SD cards! Not only would roonâs writes to its database be faster to an SSD vis-a-vis the eMMC in my test, but I suspect paging to a swap file on an SSD would make a bigger improvement.
I see no reason not to use this sub-$300 fanless PC with roon for any size database using Ubuntu and an M.2 SSD. A higher RAM model than mine may run better, but I suspect the only penalty with the 8GB model would be slow initial startup times when roon loads large databases into memory and a lot of paging occurs. In-memory object databases are notorious for this problem because thereâs no way to cluster huge graphs to eliminate non-local memory references. Works great if it all fits in RAM, but watch out once it starts paging. But once loaded, it should run fine, as paging from/to the swap file would be at typical/normal levels for any app. Linux (and Windows) have excellent virtual memory implementations. So much so that roon recommends running core on Windows with large (300,000+ track) databases. Iâve been running core on unraid (slackware) and ubuntu for many years.
Itâs wild that this little machine costing 1/10th the price of a Nucleus+ with five year old NUC technology runs just as well as the Nucleus+. Iâm just not clear how much support the extra 9x price buys â faster replies to forum posts by community moderators? I hope thereâs at least some unobtainium alloy in the casework.
ADDENDUM 1: If you go the Ubuntu+roon core option, the machine does work as an endpoint too.
ADDENDUM 2: At one point, I had the machine triple booting Win11, Ubuntu, and ROCK. I wouldnât recommend it as making the linux bootloader (grub) and Windowâs bootloader and the bios configured right can cause heartburn. But it can be done. With all the fiddling around, I eventually dropped ROCK and have it dual booting. Ubuntu is the default and Win11 is still available.
ADDENDUM 3: All the talk about background processes hurting our poor fragile audio is just FUD from two decades ago when machines were terribly much slower and resource-limited than today. This machine idles at less that 0.5% CPU utilization when Win11 is running its typical 150 background processes and Ubuntu about the same with its 70 or so processes (IIRC). Anybody who worries about this simply doesnât have the background to appreciate how light a load all this background stuff is, how light a load roon is (unless youâre doing very compute intensive DSP, like room correction with extremely long correction filters and upsampling with 8 channel surround), and how much your computerâs resources are actually idle when playing music. This FUD motivates over-priced and totally unnecessary and usually useless purchases of âaudio-gradeâ hardware like linear power supplies and silver USB cables and $100 motherboards and CPUs in $1000 cases sold at $10,000 to consumers. I hear thereâs one DAC manufacturer selling four- and five-figure dacs that sells a special ethernet card for a cool $1K.
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This was a very informative and helpful post. Thank you.
I have wondered if one could load ROCK onto the M.2 drive and DD that over to the eMMC drive. That way you could have ROCK and free up the M.2 drive for music storage. But as you say, an off-the-shelf Ubuntu works so well, it makes such a cumbersome work around seem like a waste of effort.
Glad you found this useful, @Papi_Chulo.
RoonOS doesnât take up a lot of space so youâd only be giving up a bit of the SSD drive when installing it there. And if there was a way to get it onto the eMMC drive, youâd still want the swap partition on the SSD as it should be so much faster. Still, it would be nice to use the onboard storage you paid for.
I havenât tried what you suggested, but I see three impediments:
- You canât shell into RoonOS, so youâd need to boot off of, say, a live Ubuntu USB to copy it over.
- Youâd then have to hope it had the necessary UEFI and linux drivers to access the eMMC drive during boot and while running. I suspect it doesnât because the installer doesnât, else it would be able to install on the eMMC drive.
- If RoonOS auto-updates itself, anything done to get it to run on the eMMC would be trashed during an update, so it would have to be redone.
I think the best bet is to install RoonOS in a VM on some other computer, and instead of running it, just mount the VMâs image. The o/s could then be explored, its configuration analyzed, and perhaps a way could be found to make it run on the eMMC. Maybe all thatâs needed is to add and load a missing driver for the eMMC. This might mean adding the driver and config to the UEFI boot partition too.
Regarding the driver, from what I can tell â and I have little experience with linux kernels â Ubuntu is
using the kernel module mmc_block.ko version 5.15.0-56 to make the eMMC accessible as a block device, and SDHCI as a controller interface below the file system level. Letâs hope that whatever version of linux RoonOS is built on supports these components or has equivalents.
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The HDMI outputs of the MeLE Quieter 3Q are available and working after installing (or upgrading to) Roon OS 1.0 (build 256) production. Yeah!
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Good data. Thank you.
I installed Roon on my Q3 running Win11. Easy, works superbly. Mounting it on the VESA holder gives it more air to cool, with Roon playing one zone it gets only a bit warm.
I have not yet succeeded using the HDMI port for Audio into my NAD T778. I probably messed the system a bit up by installing Dolby Access hence allowing Atmos via HDMI but Apple Music does not play Atmos (yet).
This is one of the good things with Q3 and Win11: It allows all sort of expansions in all directions. Could use it for ICloud photos or for shared disks too.
Another interesting fanless option. N6005 based.
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Small caveat: The installed Win11 has an energy setting that puts the Q3 to sleep after 3 hours. The energy setting has to be set to max performance. That seems to work only by going into the detailed energy saving settings.
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