Mmhh… my NAS supports LMS… but then… do I still need a roon server or would the roon iPad client be sufficient?
Nothing happens without a Core. All an iPad client can do without a Core is vainly hunt for one.
That’s really sad. No roon compatible NAS, no roon compatible amp, not willing to add additional (mini) PC. Any plans to implement server for Apple TV (4th gen.)?
Hi, actually you can run Roon Core on a NAS and it works really well.
Check here: http://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_Server_on_NAS
I know. I wanted to say that my NAS ist not compatible ;-).
What really confuses me… why the hell do they insist on using SSDs for their “data base”. If I/O performance is the bottleneck… on an NAS, may be striped… what the hell do they use as the basic technology for the “data base” needing such a high I/O performance? Or do they need more RAM? SSDs are still rather high-priced…
Mmhh… who will buy a new NAS with higher CPU performace and fully packed with SSDs? Having in mind that the NAS would mainly serve for a central file repository, not for a roon server. This is - sadly - one more reason for hesitating to upgrade or add further H/W in order to get roon to run.
Sometimes you cannot make the mountain come to you. You have to strap on the crampons and do some climbing.
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Mmhh… no, roon is not a mountain, it is no rocket science. Please, be aware what roon really is or wants to be, from a user’s point of view.
Undoubtedly, they already invested quite a lot of money and effort in making roon what it is right now. But, what vision do they have? What kind of customers do they have in mind?
I may be one of the youngest Roon’ers here and my dad one of the oldest and he is hopeless with a computer. But with a sonicTransporter (and the same with ROCK) he just presses the power on button and by the time he sits down, Roon is ready to play music. There’s no interaction with the computer apart from pressing the power button.
It’s just a small headless computer and a cheap Raspberry Pi Roon endpoint into his Denon receiver and it’s happy days. If he can enjoy it anyone can ! 
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They don’t. It’s simply the case that, with the database using the same disk as the boot drive, and most modern PC’s being equipped with an SSD boot drive, this is what most users will have.
Probably the same people that will spend upwards of $10,000 on a DAC with built-in streaming, which is really just a fancy soon-to-be-obsolete computer that happens to do digital to analogue conversion. Regardless, it’s not a requirement: storing your music on a traditional mechanical hard disk is more than adequate. The goal here isn’t to build an enterprise-class system capable of mining multiple terabytes worth of data with transaction response times in the milliseconds.
This old post by Brian is still worth a read on hardware tradeoffs, and the reason why using a SSD for the Roon database is strongly recommended if you have a collection of more than 1500 albums:
I am very aware Matthias, that’s why I chose it! I was prepared to do what was necessary to get the best of it and consider it time well spent.
Our team, from the first day of Sooloos, has never skimped on hardware performance. We strongly feel that good UX requires modern hardware. In ~5 years, whatever you buy for Roon today will be woefully sad. It’s the only way we can accomplish what we do.
It seems all your conflict comes from the fact that you don’t want to change your hardware, and we have suggestions/requirements that your hardware doesn’t meet.
Long term, it makes sense to move the Core into the “cloud”, eliminating it from your home, but that will require even better remotes, and a lot of development time.
It will also require something better than the piece of wet string that I currently have that laughingly calls itself my broadband connection to the internet…
where are you located?
In the wilds of the Dutch countryside, with 60 year-old copper telephone cable running ADSL on its last gasp from the telephone exchange 3.5 km away.
SSD highpriced?
The lowest cost M.2 SSD at Amazon is $50.
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I fully understand that a good UX needs a well configered system with a certain degree of H/W performance. But I currently don’t really understand for what esp. the I/O performance is crucial. Currently I use a Mac running roon client on a single spinning drive, with an NAS containing all the music files, also on spinning drives. And it works very nice and fast.
Now, I’v read that about 1,000 albums with their library would work on spinning drives with an acceptable or good UX, what ever this means. And a single album would roughly need about 1 MB of memory for meta data. I guess there’s some sweet spot for memory amount (cache) and using SSDs in favour of spindles.
From a certain amount of albums you cannot cache all the meta data of all the managed albums, that’s surer. So, assume you had 4 GB memory for library cache only. That would hold meta data for roughly 4,000 permanent albums. That’s quite a lot.
Maybe it’s some sort of full-text search that needs the higher I/O performance? What else could it be? Also real-time indexing would certainly benefit from it. But, is there anything else? Would using spindles instead of SSDs rather slow down library management/updating or retrieving albums/tracks for playback? Currently, with some hundreds of albums I don’t need any kind of search function. I just browse them as they are sorted. Is there some major difference in library management between e.g. OSX roon client and roon server?
I could imagine some new NAS for me, with sufficient RAM and CPU power in order to meet the requirements for a roon server. Combined with the iPad roon client. But, if this is rather senseless without additional SSDs… I wouldn’t go for it, at the moment. I have to limit the costs somehow 
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Some sort of roonCloud would be a completely different thing, sure. I wouldn’t wait for it .
Many people want to reuse their NAS as a Roon server.
Looking in these pages, I don’t think this is a good idea, lots of problems. I think this is because while a NAS is a computer it is not designed as a good general purpose computer.
I prefer simplicity. Today, at Amazon a ROCK compatible cmputer with RAM and SSD is less than $400, and you can leave the music on the NAS.
Easier to set up and keep working.
A single SSD is all you need for the NAS OS and the Roon database. Keep your media on HDDs in the other NAS bays to keep costs down. And as Anders points out, entry-level SSDs are cheap these days.
In RAM, we create hundreds of database indexes for the various types of metadata we hold, and cross references as well. One example of what this enables is that we can highlight artists in a bio/review that only exist in your own library.
For the content itself, it’s spread out and quite a bit larger than you’d expect. The typical compilation album has thousands of credits associated with it.
If you run on an SSD, you get a 10x-100x performance for jumping around the databases on disk (since we cant hold it all in RAM) – if you run on a spinning disk, it will work, but you will pay the penalty.
With a small number of albums, this will work fine… but as you grow your library by adding files or starring stuff in TIDAL, you will feel the pain.
Oh how I wish this was true Credits kill everything.
good! Glad you are happy with the experience. I have 12k albums and I was running in this exact configuration for a few weeks to debug some issues with performance… Everything was painfully slow.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for it, but its the most important thing on our roadmap, and probably a big part of our proper mobile solution.