I did the trial and decided I want to jump into Roon. I went ahead and did a full year at once and figure by this time next year I’ll know if I want to keep it for life or not. Although I must admit I always fear “for life” setups since I wonder how the company will hold together long term.
Anyway my setup is from a desktop I bought pretty cheap at Microcenter plus my upgrades. I figured it’d handle everything I wanted. It’s a small form factor HP desktop that came with the Amd Ryzen 3400G with Vega 11 graphics, 256TB ssd, and 8GB memory. This machine is a home server for anything I need not just ROON so the first thing I did was put 2x256 ssd, 2x4TB hdd, 2x8TB hdd, in it and using Stablebit drivepool+snapraid to set it all up. A week ago I didn’t know what any of that even was but now have it purring along using the two SSD as cache for the HDDs with 1x8TB HDD in parity setup. So overall I have just over 15TB of usable raid space which I can upgrade one drive at a time if I ever need to.
Right now I have just over 35k Flac files and growing. I’ve done a few test runs, but it was much earlier when I first started transferring files over from external drives, and I’m wondering how long it takes Roon to index everything and basically get everything setup? If I have 100k files what’s the process time for Roon to really get everything situated? Does Roon track file location if they move? Not physically from disk to disk but directory? If I decided to merge a few folders together or separate my mp3 from my Flac does roon auto update or do I need to tell it to do something?
As a fresh new setup what else would you recommend for me? Right now the server is headless in my utility room. Just had network guys run hard lines through the house. It has wireless and thought I could get away with it but being new to storage servers I just needed its own hard line. Makes a world of difference. I actually find myself using windows remote desktop from my desktop in my office then I do the actual desktop right now. Still working on trying to setup a network drive, and failing, if anyone here is a guru on that. Also does anyone know if there’s roon like software for video? Old movie collections for the past 20yrs? Have like 200+ DVDs on a few old externals in a box somewhere. Wouldn’t mind cataloging and whatnot all of them.
Anyway nice to meet everyone. I’m sure I’ll have more questions as I move forward. Glad to be here!
For video I use JRIVER Media Centre , also there is Plex. Jriver gives a lot of flexibility in how you can navigate and these days most development work is on video
Roon analyses your library in copying to your watched folders , 100 k files mayou take 2-3 days depending on processor power
Right now, “for life” is 5 years and 10 months. Not to spread FUD, but word of caution, this could go up or go away without warning.
Plex will give you music on the go and movies, too. It’s much cheaper (well, free in some cases, and frequently on sale) and you kinda get what you pay for with music, but it does work rather well with movies and tv shows.
As long as the drives are local to the core, and it can easily monitor changes, it should do just fine. Recommended procedure is copying everything over and only then indexing, though. In any case, go do some housecleaning once you’re done: in the app, settings, library, clean up library.
You didn’t say which NAS os you were running, but it IS important to note that your Roon library files REALLY SHOULD be kept on those SSD’s at all times. Getting those on a hard drive will slow things down substantially.
I’d second Plex for movie streaming. The server software is free and streaming to a TV is also free. The capability to stream to a phone/tablet requires the paid App which only a few £/$. I also have it running on my NAS. Mine isn’t set up for remote access outside of the house, so my server remains ‘unclaimed’. I like it that way - the fewer ports on my network that are exposed to the internet, the better.
Ripping DVDs is easy these days. MakeMKV is one of the best bits of software for ripping, then Handbrake to convert to a sensible file size and strip out unneeded audio tracks and subtitles. You can even rip 4k Blu-Rays, though you need a Libredrive firmware enabled drive, but they’re not expensive.
You mentioned that you’re using the two ssds as cache for the array, so it felt important to stress that you need to make sure that your roon library sticks to the SSDs.
Easy way to tell: if you randomly scroll around Roon, no music playing, just scrolling around your library, and that your hard drives spin up or seek all the time, then you might want to look into how things are set up. Other easy way: Roon is super sluggish.
So maybe I’m a little confused I think I misspoke earlier. This is how I’m interpreting things.
Library = Actual Music. My Library is on the server HDDs. The server is setup as one large pool with the SSD acting as optimized cache using Stablebit’s Drivepool. They SSD are in the pool but not really for storing mass amounts of data as they only have 256GB each.
2x256ssd, 2x4tb ssd, 2x8tb ssd all in pool. 1 of the 8tb is for parity. The C:\ is also a 256gb drive. My understanding was that Roon would use the install directory on the C:\ to build it’s database but the audio flac files themselves would be on my storage pool for actual access. With only 512GB of SSD in the pool I can’t fit my actual audio library on it.
Isn’t there a means to have Roon build the database with all the art, info, metadata on the SSD and just keep the flac files on the drives so it’s a smooth experience? I just picked up a Lenovo m10 FHD Pro tablet which isn’t the strongest in the world but was going to set it up to run Roon and be the remote I was reading about. I won’t have any other function. Looks good but keeps giving me a “disconnected from device” error at the moment but now sure how much of that is because the server is still moving everything and indexing. I’ve assigned 4 of my 6 cores to Roon which is speeding up the process.
I will say that I was doing some reading before building everything and people were asking about 8 vs 16GB memory. With Windows 10pro setup as a server and running Roon, stablebit, and dupeguru I’m currently sitting at 9GB of usage.
You’re correct that the database is what you want on your SSD’s: Roon happens to call this the library . You’ll be fine with 256/512 gigs of SSD, just make sure that your setup isn’t automatically allocating (parts of) the space Roon needs for its database (or library…) to caching your file transfers.
Thank you for the info! The 256 SSD C:\ is the only ssd not in my pool. Better to pretend the other ones don’t exist. Is there some setting in the application I need to check to ensure it’s database is on that drive? I’ve assigned 6 of my 8 cores (actually 4 cores and 8 threads) to help with all the background audio magic. Hopefully that greatly speed it up compared to the throttled option.
If you follow the “standard” install, and don’t change the directory for setup, then you will be fine and Roon will install everything on your “C:” drive.
So I have RoonAppliance in my tax manager using 53%. Is this the indexing and metadata software? I turned it down to 4 cores of use because I didn’t want my cpu at 100% for long periods of time.
During the initial period, Roon will do audio analysis on every track to determine volume leveling and to generate a waveform. This is can be intensive and a long process depending on how many tracks you have.
Option 1
Turn off the process during the day and then turn it on full throttle overnight when no one is using the system.
Option 2
Set it to analyze the audio on demand. This might add a bit of delay the first time a track is played for the analysis, but, it is only the first time.
Option 3
A Hybrid of both 1 and 2
Option 4
Just let it go and set the core usage as desired (what you are doing).
Thanks for the reply. Right now my server is chugging away about 51k out of 73k titles. I’m on my desktop in my office, connected to the server, and clicking on songs causes a lot of “flicker” in the play button and nothing is taking place. Is this because it’s not done with the initial scan? It has maybe 12 tracks on this album and it’s just flying through all of them over and over. Not playing it.
I did have a big move of files. Had a ton of MP3 mixed in. I separated about 20k of them and moved them. Would that cause the issue? Is it looking for files no longer where it thinks they are? Anyway to have it re-scan?
. You’ll be fine with 256/512 gigs of SSD, just make sure that your setup isn’t automatically allocating (parts of) the space Roon needs for its database (or library…) to caching your file transfers.