Confused about locating Roon database on synology SSD

[Johnny_Ooooops (Listener in Chief)]

@gTunes

I should have stayed out of this.

Never. Stay. Out.

[Luiz_Lobo]

my suggestion, so that you can have a better experience, and thus enjoy it more, would be to leave the NAS to store the music and run the server in another location, with greater processing power and memory, which can be from a micro or laptop old, it can be a dedicated NUC (which I use), or even your own micro or general purpose laptop that you have at home.

[DDPS]

I would suggest that having the core run on the same hardware that benefits from RAID 6 reliability along with a parallel audio playback solution (Audio Station & DS Audio), with shared playlists gives you more flexibility than any other solution out there. I would never go back to a dedicated ROCK or Nucleus.

[gTunes]

Thanks for the reminder about Audio Station. I’ve tried it on and off over the years but never really found a use for it. It’s a good reminder that with QuickConnect and/or downloading, you can use it to access music remotely.

I leave my library on the Synology and let my ROCK get to it over SMB. That works fine. ROCK doesn’t recognize library changes automatically but that’s easily addressed with a couple of UX clicks (and I don’t change my library all that frequently). That’s the hybrid strategy that works for me.

[DDPS]

Since I have meticulously groomed my file metadata over my 40+ years of digital music collecting, Audio Station & DS Audio do most everything that Roon does, sans the editorial content (which is the main reason I use Roon). Actually, DS Audio & Audio Station allow me to do track-based metadata smart playlists, which Roon (alas) can still not do. So I can make a smart playlist for all tracks from, say, 1980-1985, and it will pull individual tracks from greatest hits collections and other compilations, etc. Roon still stinks at that.

One neat thing I can do is take all the tracks that Audio Station creates in a smart playlist and I can generate a non-smart .m3u playlist file for those. Then, Roon automatically picks up this .m3u playlist when scanning my library. The only downside is I need to regenerate those once in a while to pick up changes, in case I forget to update those manually.

[gTunes]

This is very cool. Synology is such an excellent private-cloud platform. I’ve dabbled with Audio Station but gave up on it a long time ago. This thread got me to re-install it and let it index my library. I’m going to play with it on my phone but also my DAP.

No intent at antagonism here at all but how do you have 40+ years of digital music collecting. What were you doing in the early 80s? I was ripping CDs and encoding with early MP3 encoders in the 90s and started doing network streaming in 2001 or so. I’m genuinely curious what you were doing earlier than that!

[DDPS]

@gTunes

No intent at antagonism here at all but how do you have 40+ years of digital music collecting. What were you doing in the early 80s? I was ripping CDs and encoding with early MP3 encoders in the 90s and started doing network streaming in 2001 or so. I’m genuinely curious what you were doing earlier than that!

Well I started curating my CD collection back then, converting from vinyl. Still have those very first CDs from 1982 today!

[gTunes]

I thought you meant you were ripping back then. This makes more sense. That’s probably around the time I started buying cds, too. That’s a lot of years.

[Hugh_Couchman]

A quick follow up to my original post last year… As DDPS suggested, I added an external SSD to the eSATA port on my Synology 918+ for the Roon database. I have now been using it for the last several months and it is working flawlessly!