Hi There
I use Roon on my iMac (which i use for lots of other things). I still have a Mac Mini in my office.
What can you suggest. Keep using the iMac voor Roon or install roon to a Mac Mini and keep that machine alone for Roon?
Thx
A dedicated machine is always desirable. But not at any cost. The newer and more powerful the machine, the better. If it is and old Core2duo, you may run into problems. Minimum i3 and you should be OK.
If Roon is working fine on the iMac, why change? The only reason I can think of is the Mac mini possibly uses less power than the iMac (even with the display turned off).
BTW, audio processing requires a small fraction of the horsepower offered by modern computers. I use an old (2014) Mac mini i5 with just 8GB RAM for Roon. My Roon audio chain includes upscaling, convolution (for room correction) and EQ. Sources are local files and Tidal (some requiring MQA decoding). Roon reports it processing at about 7x, which indicates there’s plenty of horsepower to spare.
The extra power improves the ‘experience’ of using Roon. The speed of searches, picture loading and general responsiveness. That is the part of Roon which is quite intensive and worth the investment in my experience.
Also, a dedicated machine that runs 24/7 works better than a computer that you use for other purposes and does not run 24/7. I originally had Roon core on my Dell XPS 15 with 32 GB of ram and 1 TB SSD. It worked fine, but it was somewhat cumbersome. I would frequently shut down Roon by accident. Not running 24/7, it did not run Roon near as smoothly as my much less powerful Nucleus. The Nucleus just works great with never a hiccup.
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I use a headless i5 Mac mini to run the Roon core and nothing else. It works away 24/7 out of sight and out of mind, and maybe I’ll reboot it every few weeks. Works flawlessly.