ELAC Discovery with Roon Essentials

#1

Hello and Merry Christmas,

I have installed and tried the Roon software on my MacBook. I like it very much. Now I want to continue using Roon, but not on my MacBook. So since yesterday I have an ELAC Discovery and Roon Essentials. My music is on an external hard drive on a router. Roon Essential finds 18,000 files but it only shows one album after 4 hours.
With the Roon software I first installed everything was in the library after an hour.

Is this normal or is something going wrong here? What can I do?

Best and stay save
Micha

#2

Roon essentials is supported by ELAC so you need to contact them.

#3

Uiii, such strict rules. Interesting.
But I need to have an account here at Roon, to use Essentials, right? Not an “ELAC-account” And Elac was there with Roon from the beginning … But OK !

#4

One question more.
What is the difference between a “Roon Account” and a Roon Essential Account?

#5

I’m just a user like you so this is not an official reply.
Essentials comes free with the hardware. Roon full costs $120 a year.
Roon has features that essentials doesn’t and has many regular releases which essentials does not.

#6

OK.
Thanks a lot. As far as I know, Essential has become a lot better with the last update … But unfortunately nothing happens when importing :frowning:
I will search then further

1 Like
#7

Reading your set up now. Putting the hard drive on the router is the worst possible place. Attach it to the Mac or, if possible, the ELAC.

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#8

Michael does the Elac support a USB hard disk directly attached. If so I would go that direction, or even better if it supports an internal HD.

Regards

Mik

#9

1:0 for BluOS and Audirvana - No problems to connect to the same hdd :wink:

Best

Micha

#10

Michael you can connect to a Network Share or NAS on Roon, but many of us don’t to get the best performance as you cannot guarantee what’s happening on the network, especially if WiFi is involved. CIFS is an very chatty network protocol.

Regards

Mike

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#11

Thank you. Yes, it’s a pity that no permanent and consistently functioning standards prevail. Annoying. The users always have the disadvantage

Best

Micha

#12

Ah, a utopia! Wouldn’t that be wonderful! I mean, I’d settle for just consistently functioning.

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#13

No one on this forum uses Essentials, so we cannot tell you things about it from experience.

One thing we can do, however, is explain why music storage on the router is a bad idea in Roon. The key is that in all Roon setups the signal must go through the Core and then be distributed to Zones.

So in the case where storage is on the router the signal path is as follows:

Control sends Core a play message (this may be internal where the Core is also Control).
Core requests file from Storage.
Storage sends file to Core.
Core sends music signal to Output.

As you can see, where Storage is separate from the Core then the incoming file and the outgoing music signal use the same link. Transmitting and receiving simultaneously is called full duplex. Ethernet is full duplex, but Wi-Fi is not.

2 Likes
#14

Oh…
of course I had imagined this to be much easier. Especially since I had the Roon software on my MacBook before. That ran top. All titles from the HDD on the router (!) were scanned and added to the library very quickly. And streaming to all zones was no problem. No errors. There seems to be a big difference between Roon and Roon Essentials. Even if streaming can’t work, for whatever reason, I would have at least hoped that the data would be found over the LAN and added to the library. Like with the full version. There it goes super. And it worked now with a USB stick on the Discovery. But not for long. The Discovery lost the connection (in net). And I could no longer access the software. Too much mess for me :wink:
I want to talk to ELAC… otherwise the device just goes back again, and I stay with BlueSound

Thanks everyone for all the info and advice. And sorry I didn’t realize right away that no one here uses Essentials. The info is enough for me for.

Merry Christmas

Micha

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#15

Michael good luck with this and hopefully you will work it out.
Have a good Christmas too

Mike

#16

Hey Michael,
So many attempts … nothing works.
The device is packed again. I take the full version of Roon and think of ZEN Mini MK3.I hope this works when I connect the direct (optical) to my Rotel A14 and streaming to my bluesound Node 2i or Pulse Flex
. I have installed the full version now and roon finds all my files on the external hdd / Router. Works perfect!

Cheers

Michael

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#17

Michael it’s a pity that this was such hard work.
I thought the idea of the Elac was it was meant to be an easy introduction to Roon.
There is another thread doing the rounds about difficulty getting the Zen mini working (just in case)

It’s here if you want to read it Innuous Zen Mini as Roon Core - any good?

Regards

Mike

#18

Exactly,
Thanks a lot :wink:

Best

Michael

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#19

Hi, I have ELAC Discovery connected to NAD C 698 Power amp and working with NAD M10 and Bluesound Pulse Mini 2i in other zones. I started with my music library on a 256GB USB directly attached to Discovery. The Discovery and Pulse Mini 2i are on ethernet cable but the M10 is via WiFi. In the last 6 months I switched the library to a network folder on my NAS, also ethernet cabled to my switch. I have not had any library or playback issues once the M10, located in my main listening room, was fully certified. It does take sometime for Roon Essential to build the library but after than I find playing local content and streaming Tidal work brilliantly.

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#20

Be happy :wink: