Just to update, I have been running Roon OS or Rock on 2011 MacMini for a while zero isses aside form in beginning it seemed to stop working. Since New Roon Os update its been flawless. My question is, under Roon it lists all the HDMI out options for Audio, however if I connect a USB dac it doesnt show up in Roon connected to the Mini. I was experimenting with another Dac and was trying it connected USB to Mini and not seen at all. I use a RPI based streamer with Digi hat SPDIF out typically and sometimes a USB dac also attacked that way. Just curious if anyone knows a work around.
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Thank you so much for the information.
I just moved Roon from my desktop computer to a dedicated Mac Mini 2012 with ROCK and everything worked right away 
By the way, I installed the ffmpeg CODEC do I need to fetch others?
Nope, all good if you installed it correctly
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I assume you had to use a USB Ethernet adapter with the Mini? I do, hoping a Rock update might fix that.
And ROCK has much less background processes nor GUI like macOS. Lightweight with less CPU and i/o activities to improve sound quality.
Is it faster?
Hi everyone, I was running Roon on macOS BigSur, Mac mini 2012 and it was fine for last few years, but lately, Mac mini would just disconnect from network for no reason and I had to restart in manually. I solved it with automatic restart every night, but that didnāt really help and network was still dropping off. Itās connected through cable, ethernet. BTW, Iām using 3 digital outputs from MacMini - USB to external DAC, HDMI to Denon AVR and Optical, also to Denon AVR.
The reason I also use HDMI and Optical is that for example DTS albums, run better when sent through optical, because the output has to be set as 2 channel 16bit. Otherwise Denon AVR doesnāt recognise DTS properly. And HDMI is used for Multichannel DSD files and other Multichannel album I have. And it all worked fine. But the network issues are real pain. So I decided to try using the Roon Rock os o instead of macOS. And it works great and is definitely little bit faster than macOS. External DAC through USB works great. But multichannel files arenāt, except DTS, which works fine through HDMI output, but all the other multichannel Albums and DSD mch albums are down mixed to 2.0. In the Roon settings, thereās 5 options for output, analog, digital, HDMI 0, HDMI 1 and HDMI 2. Only the HDMI 0 is working and thatās the one where DTS works fine. All the other outputs are quiet, so I can only use HDMI 0, but that works fine with DTS only. Not with the other MCH formats. Any suggestions? I donāt want to go back to MacOS as I really like the simplicity of Rock.
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I am also curious if people have suggestions on multi-channel playback on Roon Rock on an Intel Mac mini (2011 server i7 in my case).