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…
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 .
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.
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.
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Credits kill everything.