You almost NEED a powerful server now to run Roon swiftly and take advantage of the features. I’m running a very simple setup with no dsp, and everything hard wired, and search is SLOW.
Long before getting Roon I built a little Windows file server to host my music and stream it to my Bluesound Node. This fileserver has a cheap 4 watt CPU (Pentium N3700), one 8GB RAM stick and the most budget-oriented SSD available at the time, the BX100. I’ve thought many times about upgrading, because if I need to log into it the user experience is pretty slow.
But I got Roon set up a few weeks ago with my 30,000+ tracks and it is running brilliantly. I use upsampling and DSP in the chain with a minimum 6.9x processing rate. And search takes under a second.
So I suspect either you have an enormous library or something is very wrong with that Mac Mini. But perhaps there are also some performance gains they can squeeze out of the software too and I’m always in favour of that.
a bit more modularity in the software
This I am 100% with you on. Note that the api is already open and available for use by third parties, so perhaps someone has made a client with a more light-weight UI. I know there’s already command line control.
Personally I want to add my own DSPs, which is something that a more modular design would help with. It would also allow users to decide what is bloat and leave it out of your installation.
From a software development perspective, making your code ‘modular’ at a low level can give code savings and help you avoid technical debts that cause grief later so I always recommend it for projects of any significant size or longevity. But making modular components that are optional/customisable to users means a combinatorial explosion of setups you need to test.
Roon is already highly modular in that there’s a server/client setup plus RAAT and probably a few other bits chatting to each other. And all the supported platforms will have bits that are different - I don’t think they’ll have implemented an “iOS search” as that doesn’t make sense, but for detecting new files to add to your library, they may have already needed to customise that for each OS, or for each filesystem.
So there’s already a lot to test, and I really find it commendable that it works so well (in my short experience). I really hope they find the engineering capacity to make things a bit more user-configurable and extendable, but I can understand the effort it might entail.
Some way to allow us to send music to the Roon Server from other services
That’s not really a software issue so much as a “getting other companies to change their products” issue. Bluesound made more effort on that and less effort on software… and that difference is probably why I’m now using Roon. But I would like to be able to send other live audio through Roon - something as basic as a virtual audio output device in the OS, that directs the audio to your Roon Server, and a corresponding option to select it for playback in clients. Then you could leave whatever unsupported service you like running and direct the sound wherever it’s needed, with any DSP you need along the way. I hope that’s on the cards. I’d love to be in a virtual seminar at my desk and simply add in the kitchen speakers so I can go make a cup of coffee and not miss a thing they say.
Hmmm, I can see how feature creep can build fast in software like this. And the users simultaneously complain about bloat and suggest features they personally want. I suppose it’s true, you can’t please everyone.
totally agree
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