Completely new here. Moved from a fully networked home (IE actual Ethernet ports in every room), to an 1800’s home where everything depends on wifi. Old home - one dedicated audio room very analogue - Aerial 20T, Dynaudio Confidence, Pass Labs, Musical Fidelity, Naim source, Rega source, with one concession to whole house, being a Marantz source with Airplay. Ripped some 2300 CD’s onto a NAS, which was connected to the Network by actual Ethernet cable. Lame as it was, I had iTunes, which was mapped to my NAS, and when not critically listening I could Airplay to any system in the house.
Now today. Old house, no network. Extensive talk with Crutchfield. Convinced to buy Roon Nucleus, Roon ready receivers in the two places I have a home theater setup, and Bluesound nodes everywhere else. Extremely fast Netgear Orbi throughout the home. Roon nucleus plugged via cable to the router, Bluesound nodes connected via wifi. NAS also plugged into the router. Where do I start? Roon can’t find my NAS. Roon can’t find my iTunes library, which is 95% my ripped CD’s on the NAS, but some iTunes purchases. I’ve managed to link my Tidal account to Roon, but can find no way replicate my extensive iTunes playlists either in Roon or Tidal.
Where is the actual help for a true music lover but non techie? 25 years ago, when I bought my to this day best sounding system, there was a store. I went and auditioned equipment. They came to my house with sound meters and moved speakers inch by inch until it was great. Now we have Crutchfield and equivalents. Where is the help? I’ve tried Roon customer service and get punted to looking at forums. I’m a professional in another field, but I refuse to accept that decent audio requires one to do everything oneself.
Roon support monitors this forum and will provide assistance but sometimes it can take a few days.
In the meantime there are knowledgeable fellow users who will assist you.
I don’t use NAS so I can’t help with that but I did find this article which I hope is useful.
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
4
I’d suggest hiring a professional in the audio installation field to do your setup. That’s what I do when I don’t want to learn enough to do it myself.
But failing that, some ideas. I don’t think you’re as far from a working system as you think. You’re close.
First off, it would be very helpful if you could fill out the form completely. You bought two Roon Ready receivers? What make and model? Can you see them as audio endpoints in Roon? What about the Bluesound nodes? Are they Node 2i or Node? Can you see them as audio endpoints? This NAS you’ve got – what make and model and configuration?
It looks like you’re able to connect to Roon and connect it to Tidal. Can you play from Tidal to your endpoints?
If all of that is good, there are two remaining issues, the NAS music files, and your iTunes music. Roon doesn’t like “music on the NAS”. They prefer you have a copy on a hard disk connected to the Nucleus. So that’s one thing to try. However, lots of folks do put their music on the NAS. Is the NAS share containing the music exported by the NAS? Can you see it from another computer (not the Nucleus)? Maybe you’ve just got the share wrong in the Nucleus settings. Can you give us a screenshot of those settings?
Finally, the iTunes library. Where does it live? On a Mac somewhere?
I get you frustration. I feel the same. For example for computers that is why I use apple with lower performance than solutions that would require me to get a degree in computers.
The above posted links by Jeff and the ideas by Bill are great to follow and the best thing it will be to move from nas to a hard drive connected to your nucleus. NAS can do a lot of things but in its core thinking is not meant to be used to store&use data (of course you can) NAS is meant to store backups of your data. Now doing backups do not require speed (usually are done when you are not using the computer and it is done on the network so it is slow). There are many using NAS for audio as audio does not need speedy connections, but for photo editing for example, adobe requires a local hard disk (there are workarounds but not supported by adobe).
So I would buy a large/fast hard disk, connect that to nucleus and back up that disk to your NAS.
I did use iTunes for more than ten years but as convenient as it is I would not go back. 1. the sound is better now 2. roon has a better user experience browsing and managing library.
Hope it helps and as hard as it looks you are going to enjoy the ride.
Traian
Go to Settings>Storage , you have to tell Roon where your music is ie. your NAS.
I don’t use a NAS so read the guide posted above, there may be a share needed.
Support while they do monitor the forum will probably not get involved (initially) in set up issues as nothing is (proven at this stage) to be broken and they are unfortunately over loaded.
The best bet is to provide as much info in the template above and let the forum members guide you along . There are many users who use NAS’s so lot of experience to draw on .
Once you have the NAS set up the rest should fall into place. Famous last words
That said if you prefer, @Traian_Boldea 's suggestion is good, buy a USB External Drive , or better still bite the bullet and put an SSD into the Nucleus , it will then become truly stand alone. You can then use the NAS for backing up your files rather than as the source. ( I use a NUC with a 4Tb SSD inside and a 5 Tb USB drive outside)
Hi @Neal_Maxymillian and welcome to the community, I’m sorry to hear your initial experience with roon is poor. All of the previous comments are worth considering but just a brief input from me.
As @Mike_O_Neill suggested, point roon toward the NAS storage, you should be able to navigate to the NAS and the relevant folder where your music is located. I used a Synology NAS for many years without problems so it should be possible with your setup.
Good luck and hopefully you’ll be up and running very soon.
My house was built in the 60’s so I have an idea of what that can be like. We do have an Audio Video store where equipment can be auditioned, ordered and occasionally borrowed for demos at home. After discovering Roon I had them come out and add Ethernet to most rooms in the house. Tough job and not cheap, but worth it to me.
A useful app to have for looking into Network issues is Fing. This product can be installed on your phone and when run, will give you a list of all of the detected devices on your network. This would be a good first step to check if all of the devices you are expecting to see are correctly connected. Once you have this is established, then next steps should be investigated, but if its wrong from the start the next steps are unlikely to work
It looks like you’ve been given a whole host of ideas to work with. Please feel free to ask questions here and if there’s anything I can offer, I will step in too!
