I’ve tried. I’ve been patient. I’ve dug through Reddit threads and forum posts. Roon just keeps performing terribly on my Macs. My dedicated Roon server Mac mini is constantly overheating with maxed out CPU. My work desktop spends more CPU on a roon player that is idling than on Illustrator and Photoshop combined. Add to that the constant erratic playback behavior… and my patience is at its utter end.
What a disappointment this has become. Money spent, time invested. I honestly feel violated.
I feel you. I was endlessly frustrated by Roon on the Mac. A very powerful Mac.
I gave in and spent a grand on a Small Green Computer SonicTransporter i5/16GB.
I shouldn’t have had to do that. You shouldn’t have to, either, but…
Everything works very well now. Mostly.
I’m a little bit poorer, but much less frustrated.
Andrew Gillis at SGC is a solid guy.
I have a nearly flawless experience with roon on a MacBook M1.
Roon usually takes up only 2gb of ram. i have no memory leaks.
The whole thing is running on 5ghz WiFi.
CPU usage is between 2-7% on one core while upsampling to 768khz and running DSP, headroom management etc.
My core is on a 2018 Mac mini with 8Gb RAM - running Roon is its only job. Rock solid experience. Like many others report, there is a slow memory leak, but as long as I reboot it about once a week it does not affect Roon.
Would you like us to shift your post to Support ? If you provide the usual details about your system and network then something might be able to be done about these issues.
This probably isn’t helpful, but I run Roon on a dedicated, headless 2007 Mac Mini and have no issues with it at all. It is stuck on Yosemite, which maybe is the reason it works so well.
I think I paid $200 for it on EBay.
Edit: Sorry, it is actually a 2009 Mac Mini.
Funny. I went the other direction. I got rid of my sonicTransporter i9 because of support issues and went with a M1 Mac mini. I use HQPlayer upsampling to DSD256 and the M1 Mac mini runs both the Roon server and HQPlayer better than the sonicTransporter.
No memory leaks here either.
Granted I don’t use upsampling since my gear doesn’t go that high. But my 2017 MacBook Air functions as both Roon core and music system in the living room. It’s an i5 with 8 gb of RAM and it’s dead silent and stays cold. Runs on macOS 12.4 Monterey. My M1 MacBook Pro also has no issues with Roon either.
So my guess is not all Mac’s are horrible with Roon.
For long time my Roon Core was on a Mac Mini (M1) without any problems.
Recently shifted towards a Nucleus, as I needed the Mini for other things.
Hardly hearing any differences. So for me, no problems with Apple which is my main system.
Help would give greatly appreciated. Honestly, things are so bad, I wouldn’t even know where to start.
For one. My i7 16GB Mac mini is a dedicated Roon core, running only the server process. It’s hooked up directly to my router via 10cm of cat cable. It goes berserk all the time… maxing out CPU, fan on full speed, running hit as can be. This thing alone baffles me.
Only starting the player on my newer mini, also i7, 64GB… same thing. Also hardwired to the network.
I can send logs etc. If you want to have a look.
I know the frustration and fascination with Roon. If we want to help others in the community, we have to draw comparisons, what goes differently in supposedly similar situations. Hardly anyone here would recommend his friend to try it with 2GB and WLAN at the highest DSP upscaling. That this could work in the majority of use cases is just as unlikely as an error rate of zero per thousand. Even Roon gets into situations where it doesn’t work.
If someone only streams, doesn’t heart much, and doesn’t want to manage their own local library, the demand on the system isn’t the same either.
Unfortunately, I can’t really help with the Macbook, since I only have a very old one from 2009. Maybe others can ask the right questions and give solution answers.
It’s unusual for Roon to make a system sweat like this. I don’t experience that even with many million titles (Windows and Linux).
It already comes in the combinatorics with other factors, settings and updates of the operating system levels / drivers to complications, but we know too little of your system and your desired application (large / small amount of own music tracks, use of Qobuz / Tidal, extensions in use, which audio devices connected how…).
I have read many accounts of this CPU-overload happening. On this forum and on Reddit. So I am definitely not alone in this. Furthermore, I don’t even have any titles (less than 100) stored locally… I just stream Tidal. No extensions whatsoever. Streaming into a BlueSound Node 2i (which I am looking to upgrade / replace as I do not fully trust it as a Roon end point).
Networkrouter only with IPv4? plus DNS from Google 8.8.8.8?
Hmm, I have never had a good experience running Roon on Apple hardware. I now use a NUC with ROCK. The only way to go, but that’s not a help to you.
Try an experiment. Instead of going thru the Bluesound, connect directly thru a USB port of the Mini. Reboot the the Mini. Just an experiment in simplifying things.
Ok I moved this to support for you.
Can you please provide more details of your system so @support can better assist you.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Like many others I can only refer to my own experience running Roon Server on a 2012 i7 quad core Mac Mini 16GB, 500GB SSD OS 10.15.7 (the max the machine allows) and music on a USB connected drive.
It’s flawless running multiple endpoints with DSP. It’s been playing for the last 5 hours and this is what activity monitor displays:
Temperature ranges from 50 to 60 C (120-140F). I use Tidal, have about 33k local tracks, Library just over 44k tracks.
I used to have Roon on my desktop 2020 iMac (i5) and had no problems with Roon, Photoshop, Lightroom etc. running concurrently.
But, I decided to get a Mac mini (M1) for a dedicated Roon server (for no other reason than it was on sale). So far, all is well with the new setup, as it was with the old setup.
But this weekend, Roon searches are maddeningly slow and I hope it is just the holiday weekend (I have both Qobuz and Tidal).
And I checked GPU time on the Mini and it is typically well over 100% when the ssearches are slow.What were the Roon symptoms of your Mac problems and were they intermittent or constant? Or was it just mini sweating too much?
What happens when you uninstall Brave? And Emby Server?
Well, I can try that, but I’d rather not. When I had my iMac as the Roon core, I had Brave, Emby, Photoshop, etc and it ran well.
Note this just started this weekend. It goes away for a while if I quit Roon and restart.
I can move Emby to another machine but I have the Roon music and Emby movies on the same hard disk. So I’d rather not uninstall…I can shut down Emby and see what happens, first.
Update: I uninstalled the browser and stopped Emby…and so far so good
