As a mixer/dj/producer, I have been collecting music all of my life, mostly 70s & 80s. Many coming from tape and vinyl, my need was not reproducing ultra-definition but handling an ever-growing, non-standard and unmanaged collection. When Sonos appeared around 20 years ago, I was one of the early adopters (still using those original zones as unique Roon endpoints) only to discover that the max number of songs in the database was around 64,000 (I tripled that count by then). So years passed thru forgetting what I had in my hard disks, trying whatever I found with no success until I found Roon. I think it was version 1.6 which I mounted on one of my NAS (Qnap) and with a good search (then) and speed, I was soon streaming to Sonos and iPad, so I immediately purchased a lifetime license.
Having a new logic to manage music, I had to learn and adapt to it and create my own custom albums, many of which have thousands of songs. I have invested lots of hours and still on the (never-ending?) journey of grooming my collection. After a few weeks and new Roon versions, I started having annoying problems in search and delays between pressing play and actually hearing the song, so that started the multi-year adventure of trying Roon in all the hardware and platforms I had around (As a tech guy I normally have the most recent computer gadgets). Having installed Roon on NAS, PCs, macs and Linux, the conclusion was that all behaved more or less the same.
I only use local music, no streaming services. My personal machines are high-end NUCs and that didn’t make a difference. Had tried local storage but my need is to have my music over the network to play (DJ) with it and share to other applications. The previous NUC I had as a Core was a NUCi710 over 2.5Gb, but I repurposed it as a karaoke server. I had an M1 mac mini around so I used it for some weeks, only to discover that between the common memory leaks and the song count, 8GB RAM was not enough.
Roon on NAS works pretty fine, but I prefer to free the NAS resources for other jobs. I recently bought a little N100 micro PC that worked nice, but not for a lot of songs. I think I will end with an average of 300,000 songs on line.
Some weeks ago I found a great MINISFORUM Venus Series NPB7 Mini PC, 13th Gen Core i7-13700H Small Computer, 32G DDR5+512G PCIe4.0 SSD, 2X HDMI(4K)+2X USB4(8K) Output, 2X 2.5G RJ45 Port, 4X USB3.2 Small Form Factor in Amazon, so decided to give it a try, mostly because of the DDR5 (which NUC don’t offer) and the native 2.5Gb ports. WOW, what an amazing machine! Highly recommended. I don’t like the color and plastic finish, but it is located on the server room, out of sight.
Here I share some specifics of what I’ve learned in my multi-year journey that I see as being asked very often:
- Roon experience is the same in any platform you choose, supposing equivalent hardware. Any local collection around 50K-80K songs will mostly work fine anywhere. As you increase, more horsepower will be needed.
- Rock is easily installed in most hardware, no matter if big enterprise server o little mini PC. You can add -any- 2.5Gb USB dongle if needed. HDMI audio won’t be supported everywhere (I don’t need it).
- Don’t want to talk about search…
- To have a good overall experience, all the components in the chain have to be equivalent and reiding on a robust network. I have a 10Gb access and tested performance to my music shared folder, so access from any machine is immediate.
- Roon delays are drastically mitigated in the mentioned hardware. I am able to ingest an amazing average of 10,000 songs per hour, so 500,000 in about two days (!). Boot scan for 160,000 songs in less than 10 seconds!
- Recent Roon versions really seem to have fixed the memory leaks (or whatever the problem was) and show a better experience, being the best combination I tried b1348 + b1348. I was just upgraded to b1352, b1353 and b1354 for IOS, Rock and Windows, so hopefully these will also work great.
- Roon versioning is confusing. How can production builds are suddenly newer versions than earlyaccess (??)
Hope this is helpful, keep Rooning!