Installing Roon To An Alternate Drive (2019)

Several people have asked if Roon can be installed on a drive other than the System (C: for example) Drive in Windows. The challenge, many of us have computers with a smaller SSD for the System Drive (C:) and a secondary hard drive with much larger capacity (D: if you will). The Roon database and associated files can take up many, many megabytes particularly if you have many music files). Of course it would be best if Roon allowed us to “CHOOSE!” the installation folder but here’s a possible work around.

There’s a technology built into most operating systems called Symlinks. Using a Symlink (and free utilities) you may be able to “move” the Roon installation folder to another drive with more capacity. I’ve done it myself and so far things appear to be working as expected. Please note though there’s no guarantee, and it’s not fair to expect Roon to support such an install (but maybe begging to allow us to choose the installation destination may help!).

To facilitate the process I use a Windows freeware tool called Folder Move 1.2 Free (though it is possible for technical folks to use the built in command line tools in Windows and most likely OS X to accomplish the same thing). Note you will need to run the utility as “Administrator”.

If you click on the shortcut/launcher for Roon on your desktop or the Start Menu you will see it has been installed in a folder called C:\Users\youraccount\AppData\Local\Roon\Application\ where “youraccount” is your user account Note you may need to choose in Windows Explorer View, Hidden Items to see that folder. The trick is to create a Symlink of this folder which points to a different drive and path.

So basically I setup a similar path on drive D using Windows Explorer (D:\Users\youraccount\AppData\Local) and then use the Folder Move 1.2 Free utility choosing the drive C: Roon installation path as the source and drive D: path as the destination (note let Folder Move 1.2 create the \Roon and associated folders, don’t create it ahead of time, the software reminds you) and choose Move and set Symbolic link. The software will let you know if you’ve been successful.

I know this is pretty technical, and those familiar with the command line can use the built in Symlinks functionality in Windows or OS X and move copy utilities to accomplish the same goal. As always make a backup of your system (or particularly your original Roon installation folder, or the built in library back up tools), and again, it’s probably not fair to expect Roon to support such an installation, but so far it’s working for me without problems.

1 Like

Thanks for the information. But since this is not an officially supported option, I am moving this to the Tinkering section.

Thanks, Michael, this looks interesting. And immensely appealing, as my C drive is running out of room.

But the lack of comments/feedback – as in, zero over the past 3 years, except from Moderator Daniel – scares me. Has anyone besides the poster tried this?

A little late to the party I see, but I would like to add another request to allow the Roon database to be on a drive other than the system drive. I’ve read some of the older threads, from gosh 7 years ago (really?), and I’m sorry I’m just not buying that “it’s hard”. I’ve been a software developer specializing in databases for 40 years. It is TRIVIAL to allow application files on any disk that is available. Lots of people are going to have relatively small system drives and large storage drives and these days they are often both SSDs (mine are). If your concern is forcing and/or warning about not using an SSD you can detect that. I know how to use symlinks, and may mess with that, but there is no good reason we should have to. Otherwise, it’s looking like a great product. Thanks.

I should qualify my last post and say that I can think of one good reason why you might do that and it is “users of consumer entertainment software are usually technically illiterate and we don’t want the support headaches telling them to stop doing bad things”. I get that. You could make that setting hard to navigate to and surround it with scary language or something.

I’m also wondering how much of a concern this should be. I’m just getting started and haven’t imported any files yet. I know the difference between the audio files and the metadata you store in your database so that isn’t a concern, but there has been chatter about “bloat” in your database. Perhaps that’s old and has been resolved by now. I imagine my library will be in the 10-20 thousand file range. If the database for that is around a few gigs, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. But if we’re talking about tens of gigs it can be more of an issue. Thanks.

Welcome to the Roon community, @Jeffrey_Larson.

The official answers is that this isn’t possible, which is why this topic is filed under #tinkering.

I’m not a Windows user, but I image that anyone who cares enough to use another drive can mount that drive (bind) to the standard Roon folder, or follow instructions posted in the forum.

Your database is likely to be no more than a few GB.

For what it’s worth, my entire Roon installation folder (it’s on as NAS, but database should be about the same size regardless of the platform), including program, logs, caches, etc.etc. is 1.74GB. That’s for ~40K tracks, multiple endpoints, convolution filters etc.