Install Roon Rock on Apple Silicon Mac

[sojc701]

Motivation

I have a Mac min M4 as a server running not only Roon core but other applications. I wanted to assign a different ip address to Roon server other than a default ip address for the Mac mini so that I can put Roon in an independent VLAN to isolate the network traffic.

Requirements

• Apple silicon Mac
• UTM - virtual machine app
• Roon Rock
• ffmpeg codec

Installation Steps

• Prepare files

  1. Download UTM and install it
  2. Download Rock and unzip it.

• Setup a virtual machine for Rock

  1. Click “Create a New Virtual Machine”
     
     
  2. Click “Emulate”
     
     
  3. Click “Other”
     
     
  4. Click “Browse…”
  5. Select the downloaded Rock file, “roonbox-linuxx64-nuc4-usb-factoryreset-100000258.img”
  6. Click “Continue”
     
     
  7. For Hardware, I do not change anything but you can adjust memory size and the number of CPU cores according to your system resource.
     
     
  8. For Storage, 45GB is enough to run for me because external music files will be accessed through network share.
     
     
  9. Just continue for Shared Directory
  10. Assign the name and click “Open VM Settings”, and then click “Save”.
      
      
  11. It brings up the settings page.
      
      
  12. Go to “System” section, and click “Force Multicore”.
      
      
  13. Go to “QEMU” section, and unclick “RNG Device” and click “Balloon Device”.
      
      
  14. Go to “Sharing”, and unclick “Enable Clipboard Sharing” and select “None” for “Directory Share Mode”.
      
      
  15. Go to “Network”, select “Bridged (Advanced)” for “Network Mode” to assign an independent ip address to Rock and select the ethernet network interface(en0 in my case) for “Bridge Interface”. (Actually I changed the interface from en0 to a virtual interface later to assign another tagged VLAN).
      
      
  16. Go to the first “IDE Drive” assigned to Rock image file, change “Image Type” to “Disk Image” and change “Interface” to “USB”.
      
      
  17. Go to the second “IDE Drive” for internal storage, change “Interface” to “NVMe”.
      
      
  18. And finally click “Save” and then start the virtual machine.
      
      

• Follow the installation step explained in 5. Installation section of Rock Install Guide.
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• After the installation is done, click the power button to shut down the virtual machine.
  

  

• Delete “USB Drive” from the setting and then click “Save”.
  

  

• Restart the Rock virtual machine.

• Access the Rock web UI using the ip address.
  

  

• Install the missing codec, ffmpeg.

References

• UTM Documentation
• Roon ROCK on Proxmox Virtual Machine
• How to install Roon Optimized Core Kit (ROCK) on ESXi
• How to Setup VLAN Interface on Mac, Linux, Windows Server, and Windows 11

[Tom_Tsui1 (Tom Tsui)]

Very nice.
Thank you