Ideal Core for 337k tracks?

I tell people an average of 3000 CDs per 1TB. That assuming 10 tracks per CD and most CDs are not the full 60 minutes. Our CD ripper uses standard FLAC (lossless) compression at 2 to 1.

So 30k tracks per TB.
15K per TB is you have AIFF or WAV (no compression)
150K per TB for mp3. mp3 is about 10 to 1 compression.

And a lot less if you are using DSD, hi-rez or other hi bitrate formats.

1 Like

That accounts for the difference since these files are an order of magnitude larger; approx 4TB of your collection.

Thanks guys

I lost track of how many DSD files I have…

1 Like

I’m serving a larger library via a dedicated Asus Mini ITX with i5-7600T CPU running Arch Linux and apart from the Genre browse (which I suspect has never been optimised by the dev team) Roon is pretty much instantaneous on my iPhone, Pixel 2 and a Win 10 client I set up over the weekend for testing. Once the library scanning is done the only things that matter (I don’t upsample) are sufficient ram, ram speed, local storage and the fastest SSD you can get your hands on. The entire thing is set and forget, it just works…no need to buy some 3rd party branded device that’s pretty much going to do the same thing at a premium unless you want it sitting in or on your hi-fi rack. My Roon server is nowhere near my listening environment.

Ditto my library is a bit smaller, 120k files

I have i7 7700 16 g ram, 250 ssd ,4 tb spinning drive

All generic stuff

Mike

FYI - here’s a previous discussion of having a huge library:
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/my-experiences-with-rock-and-a-500k-tracks-library/27385/10?u=wklie

Very interesting thread! But unfortunately it leaves me confused. It says that for collections greater than 300K tracks you should really use Windows. Does that rule out Nucleus+? Is there a pre-built Windows-based server that anyone would recommend?

we’ve made some optimizations since that time, and 500k is still radically different than 337k.

Thanks, Danny. That’s great news and I would much prefer to go the Nucleus+ route. But I will point out that in that thread Brian (Roon CTO) said the following (note the reference to libraries with 300K+ tracks):

That was the advice before Nucleus existed. It was a proven solution but as Danny says, there have been optimisations to Roon and there continues to be improvements in areas in Linux where previously Windows 10 was unquestionably superior. What does @danny think about the possibility of getting Nucleus to work in clusters? So for those really big libraries you got 2 to load share?

@Steve_Fisher – updated his post w/ an edit at the top.

I think that is a large amount of work for the handful people with libraries larger than 1m tracks. Until that point, you can still buy powerful enough single devices.

Dear @Steve_Fisher,

Thank you for choosing QNAP NAS, and we would like to help you on the Roon and NAS issues. Would you please submit a ticket via QNAP Helpdesk and kindly provide us your ticket number? Our support team will contact you in time, thank you very much!

Best Regards,
QNAP Marketing Team (marketing@qnap.com)

4 Likes

Nice of QNAP marketing to chime in here… :smiley:

1 Like

Steve,
Although I am sure a Nucleus+ would be better (I’m waiting to try one), the configuration you are describing is almost exactly the same as one I have been running for a while. I use the same Qnap for 350k tracks and since it settled down (which took a few weeks of analysis etc) it has been very reliable. I don’t have need to reboot Qnap (current uptime 101 days).
Having said that, it depends I imagine on what else you are asking it to do. Although I use several endpoints, I never request signal processing on the Qnap - I suspect that would stress it out.
My interest in the Nucleus+ is faster focussing.
The image below shows the resource usage on Qnap.

image

I was prompted to answer you about the Ultradac. In my experience the Sooloos network endpoints will always give a better sound than a USB connection, especially from a PC or Qnap. At this level of performance everything makes a difference, including cables, router etc.
Danny is right that having the analogue audio parts well away from ‘radio noisy’ networking is a good idea.

5 Likes

2 posts were split to a new topic: How do people find time to mess with electronics when they have huge music libraries?

Thanks!! This is really helpful. I can’t explain the issues I was having with the QNAP – I used it only for Roon, and I did no signal processing. And yet after a couple of days all the Roon Controls would get very, very slow. Then when the QNAP was rebooted all would be good again, for a little while.

In any event, I now have my Nucleus+ up and running. Migrating to it was extremely simple, as you’d expect. I’m still storing most of my music on the QNAP, although since I had a 500GB SSD in the QNAP to run the Roon Core I decided to move that drive into the Nucleus+ and stored my most frequently listened to music there. I doubt it makes a difference, but I just wanted to give it a shot.

The Nucleus+ was a little slow at first, but today I installed an additional 8GB of RAM and it’s made a big difference.

And based on everyone’s advice I am continuing to send music to the UltraDAC over the network using the Sooloos protocol – works great!

Thanks everyone for all the help and advice. What a great community!

[Moderated] There must be 3 or 4 firmware updates in the last 101 days…u don’t update???

My guess is that your import or analysis finished, as that is a very resource intensive task

The extra RAM should allow a larger library to not crash. It should not impact performance at all. It’s just not how we use RAM.

No – the import and analysis had finished but it was still slow – much slower than when the Roon Core was running on the QNAP.