I just got Roon and want some kind of Roon core PC running Roon Rock since I don’t want to turn on my PC everytime andhaving my music available in the whole network is also useful.
What hardware is ‘good enough’ for a Roon Rock?
I don’t use any DSP and have about 7000 Songs in my library. I also use Qobuz but probably quit it after the free trial, because 20€ is a bit too much and they also don’t have 50% student discount like Tidal or Spotify.
There are many mini PCs available for under 150€ with intel Celeron or Atom. Is this enough?
And another question about Roon Rock: Can I access the music stored on it from any other network player, when I don’t want to use Roon anymore but keep the Rock as a Network storage for music?
You can run the Roon core software on pretty much any reasonable computer. I’m using an i5 with 8gb RAM and a 500gb ssd. Doing a tiny bit of DSP, not having any trouble. I’m not running Rock, but Roon Server on the Windows 10 that came on the computer. It’s running headless, accessed by Remote Desktop. I’m also running Plex on the same computer, pointing to the same folder with all of my FLAC files. No problem. If you run Rock you can only have the computer be a Roon core, nothing else. That’s what Rock is. But you can remove Rock & put Windows or Linux on the computer if you decide to bail on Roon, then use it to run Plex or something similar.
Just to be clear, ROCK is designed for certain Intel NUCs only. If you want to run Roon Server on anything else (Mini-PC etc) it will probably not be ROCK that you are running (drivers only support NUC chipsets), just the headless Roon Server for whatever OS you have on it.