Install/Add NAA on Roon Rock (Intel nuc)

Hi guys!

So i have a roon rock in my Livingroom with a Musical Fidelity V- Linc feeding my active speakers (bult in dac).

I have a ”powerful” desktop PC on the same network with HQPlayet installed, is it possible to use it to do the work and then send the signal to my nuc running roon core os?

I have added HQplayer in roon but I have no clue as how to configure this to work as stated above.

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Audio path is following:

Roon → HQPlayer → DAC (audio output)

Once data leaves Roon, it is all up to HQPlayer what happens then and where it goes. It is not possible to get data from HQPlayer back to Roon. HQPlayer handles the audio output.

I might have been unclear, I do not want the data back into Roon, I just want it back to the same device, using NAA installed on it and then output using the attached USB Vlink device.

In my case Roon is only used as a front end, and I was thinking that the purpouse of NAA is to have any computer that has HQplayer installed, be able to transport the sound it upsamples to any NAA device (or computer with NAA installed).

So my thoughts were:
Intel Nuc with Linux (Roon Rock) → Desktop computer HQplayer (Hqplayer added in Roon GUI on Nuc) → Desktop Computer (HQPlayer server) → NAA device with my VLink selected as audio device (ideally my Intel Nuc with Roon Rock + added NAA drivers/app).

Accomplishing this by installing NAA drivers on the Linux (Roon Rock) Nuc. If any such do exist for linux.

Rock is a locked down os to run Roon core and Roon core only . You cannot install anything to it. You need to run Hq player or NAA on another device. Or install a different Linux distro on the NUX and then you can.

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You cannot install NAA on Roon ROCK.

But you could boot up my NAA OS image on the NUC. It is minimal purpose-built OS for running just NAA and nothing else. You can even remove the boot media once it is booted up.

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Put Jussi’s special NAA image on a microSD card in a RPi4.

That way you can keep Roon running ROCK on your NUC.

Thanks guys!

I actually have a “spare” NUC so I’m considering Jussis suggestion to run the mentioned NAA image on that one :wink: Where can I find that Image, the Signalyst page has nothing that I can relate to it on the download page…

As I only use PCM 24/192KHz (no DSD dac) the CPU required for even the “toughest” filters does’nt seem to exceed 10% on any of my NUC’s and is even lower on my Xeon server, so Ideally, it would be awesome if the Roon Rock image could have the Linux version of HQplayer installed negating requirement of additional devices.

I would even gladly pay some Linux nerds to modify that image and add it :smiley: (nothing is locked down, and nothing is secure…).

https://www.signalyst.eu/bins/naa/?

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Ah I missed you mention you had a spare NUC. In that case, yes burn NAA image to USB stick using Etcher:

https://www.signalyst.eu/bins/naa/images/naa-4121-x64.7z

For headless operation of both Roon and HQPe on same machine, best to install Ubuntu on that machine.

Easiest solution though is keeping using Roon on your ROCK NUC and have seperate spare NUC running just NAA.

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In that case I’d recommend to run HQPlayer OS image on the spare NUC instead of NAA. Then you have Roon and HQPlayer on separate machines.

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Thanks guys for all the good tips!

@jussi_laako I have some trouble having HQplayer OS recognize my “Musical Fidelity V-Link (Usb)” do I need to add drivers somehow? none of the output options via remote control worked and none of them had a name even related to V-Link.

No, it should work fine without. Name depends on the USB device manufacturer.

@jussi_laako I ran the NAA image for raspeberry 3 on my Raspeberry 3B+, seems like the NIC is not supported / recognised?, no network, would it be possible to create an NAA image for the 3B+ if this is the issue?

I’d be happy to pay/donate if that would help :slight_smile:

PS. Booting into Raspeberry OS shows NIC and all works once there, but not when booting the image, the Nic is missing and the device is not sensed in my router.

Did you load the Pi3 image? Not the Pi4 by accident?

image

Hi, I used the “naa-4112-raspberrypi3.img” image.
But thanks for the sanity check :slight_smile:

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What does “ifconfig” show?

How are you planning to use Pi3? If through USB, you can already forget about it due to hardware design issues. Pi3 is only useful through it’s I2S port.

For USB DACs you should use Pi4 instead.

Pi4 is so cheap that I don’t see point in continued support for Pi3 hardware.

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I love NAA image on my Allo DigiOne (Pi3).

I would need to buy a new case (not just Pi4) if support stopped :cry:

100% agreed about not using USB output of Pi3 though. I use Pi4 NAA with USB output a lot - rock solid reliable.

For Pi4 + HifiBerry combos I’ve been buying nice steel cases from HifiBerry. Costs 20€…

Supporting some old hardware easily costs me thousands in time. I try to balance how much time I spend on such things, because it’s away from other things like implementing that loudness support.

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I see, thats unfortunate because that is what I intended to do, not really impressed with this little piece of hardware so far with all the limitations, but you live you learn.

Thanks for the info, will put it out for sale and just use my other NUC instead, although it’s way overkill for just an NAA.