Hello everyone. I have been planning on setting up roon for a year now and finally can get it started. My first decision point is the server. I thought the Nucleus one would be my answer but my library is 8TB large and greatly exceeds the Nucleus One Limitation. ( About 60% MP3 40% flac) I have everything Mac so I thought about picking up a Mac Mini for the server and installing Rock. The one I have in mind is a 2018 Mini, 32GB i7 processor with 512 GB SSD storage. I recently purchased the Cambrige EVO 150 DAC Amp to pair with my system. Here are my questions; Iād appreciate some advice and updated comments based on the newest Roon requirements.
How many tracks or albums are these 8 TB, approximately?
Are they all official releases or do you have a lot of other stuff like bootlegs or a bandās live archives?
Are they all sorted neatly into an artist/album folder structure or do you have folders with lots of content within a folder, such as an artist with 1000 albums or a folder with 1000 tracks in it?
@ROBERT_WRUBLOWSKY - Iāve moved your post from the Support category of the forum to the Roon Software Discussion category, since you are asking a question of the Community at large, rather than asking the support team to fix a technical problem. Thank you for your understanding.
My Roon server is a 2018 Mac mini (i3 32GB RAM with 128GB SSD). All my local music is on a Synology NAS. Even my lowly i3 Mac mini has no trouble with hires playback (up to DSD256) with moderate DSP applied (3 separate parametric EQ configurations).
I think the 2018 MAC mini is a great choice for running Roon. But my setup is the Roon server running on top of macOS 13 (Ventura); I assume ROCK is intended for non-Apple NUC devices, but I could be wrong. Of course, running macOS requires accessing your Mac mini to apply macOS updates; but all Roon updates can be applied from any Roon app (running on an iPhone or another Mac).
Definitely, but interactive performance in the UI, Focus, etc., depends on the library size (while playback and DSP doesnāt).
This is correct. I had overlooked this, thanks for noticing:
ROCK can probably be installed on your Intel Mac Mini, but it will not be a configuration that is supported by Roon Labs. (It canāt be installed on Apple Silicon (ARM) Minis (or any ARM models) at all).
The only officially supported devices for ROCK are the Intel NUCs on Roonās compatibility list.
If you are comfortable with Macs, Iād run the Roon server on macOS.
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It is going to be a lot.
About 50,000 CD quality FLAC tracks per 1 TB is a good average estimate. Multiplying that by 8TB for FLAC alone results in 400,000 tracks.
But as the proportion is 60 percent MP3, that majority likely contains at least three times the number of FLAC tracks per unit of storage, i.e. about 150,000 MP3 tracks per 1 TB, about 1.2 million MP3 tracks per 8 TB.
Do the 60/40 proportional math, and the final number is around 880,000 tracks.
AJ
I figured maybe the other half is DSD1024 
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Welcome Robert,
I have about 1.5 tb of stored music here. Just over 68k tracks. I donāt know the correct ratio. But I have 6 DSD albums, I guess about 70% FLAC and the remaining 30% is a mix of mp3 and aac files. Add Qobuz and Tidal to the mix and I am looking at a library of 86.7k tracks.
My LMDE 6 (Linux) Lenovo laptop handles it (8th gen i7 CPU, 16 gb of RAM and a 1 tb SSD). My previous Roon Servers were all Macs running either on MacOS or Linux. (2017 MacBook Air ā 2014 Mac Mini ā 2020 M1 MacBook Pro). All with 8 gb of RAM. They worked, but the 16 gb of RAM in the Lenovo really makes a difference.
Next to Roon ARC for my iPhone, my Roon Server serves 3 or 4 endpoints and occasionally one or two wireless speakers. Depending on the weather outside if it is nice chilling on the balcony.
The only DSP I am using is volume leveling. As I prefer to have a balanced level sound.
I am not sure if 32 gb of RAM will be sufficient if your 8 tb hard drive is full of music. That sounds like a really large library to me. Since youāre having a 2018 Mac Mini youāre having the choice between running your Roon Server on MacOS or Linux. The SSD is more than large enough to house your Roon Server. CPU and RAM are likely the weakest links in the chain. Do make sure your Roon Server is connected to Ethernet. Wifi is from my own experience insufficient.
The same goes for your endpoints. My Cambridge CXN V2 is connected through Ethernet as it drops wifi a lot. Although my other streamer, a Bluesound Node X, is more than happy playing on wifi all day.
I havenāt heard the EVO as Iāve went with the CX2 series of Cambridge equipment. CXA81, CXN V2, CXC V2 and a DacMagic 200M 
I am not sure that anything will be sufficient. If this is a million track library, Roon just is not built for that, and Roon staff have said so themselves.
AJ
My local library is 12,000 PCM and 4,000 DSD files.
While my 2018 i3 Mac mini works well for me (I havenāt noticed any UI lagginessā¦ except for occasional searching/filtering slowness) Iām thinking of migrating to an M2 Mac mini. I understand thereās possibly a single/multi-core limitation in the Roon app that may prevent DSP processing improvement; if thatās the case, then I imagine getting the newest CPU (such as the 2024 M4) would give you the best overall experience.
If someone is purchasing a new Mac mini, I guess the base 2024 M4 model would likely last them 10 years as a Roon server.
ROON server on an Antipodes S40 (Intel Nuc Pentium Silver 1.5 GHz / 8 GB RAM). Most colleagues here in the forum would probably say = undersized
8 TB SSD filled with 3.5 TB of music = 3392 albums, 62636 tracks, 1277 artists, 334 composers - Flac, Flac 24 bit, DSD, no MP3.
3 rooms, 4 end points, upsampling to the next higher resolution (except DSD = native)
The CPU utilization is usually well below 10% during operation, and there are no problems with handling the library smoothly, stable and fast.
I think your MAC Mini will be enough for you.
Itās just that the OPās is most likely several times as large. (And most likely the run-time of various Roon database algorithms grows faster than linearly). We really need to know the number from the OP
If itās a one million tracks library, āthe fastest machine possibleā is good advice. Users really should consider the official specs and not think that they can ignore it:
Largest Libraries
If you have over 250K+ tracks in your library, consider us impressed! Youāre among the top .01% of Roon users, and you have a library most of us could only dream of.
With libraries this large, we expect the right hardware will work, but itās not something we test in-house.
Your best bet will be to get a beefy Roon OS setup with a fast new CPU and plenty of RAM, but a very high-spec system running Linux, Windows, or macOS can work just as well.
We strongly recommend you engage with members of our user community when making any hardware purchase decisions for a very large library. There you will find a number of music collectors, like yourself, who have first-hand experience with getting the most out of Roon when the library track count is best represented in terms of fractions of a million tracks.
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Thanks all for weighing in. My intrepidation remains. Iām picking up the mini tomorrow and just throwing caution to the wind. We will see how it goes. I might just have to Kull down my 127 Dylan albums and bootleg tracks. Lol
fyi i have 15000 albums on a 8tb ssd. also use qobuz.
for rock you only need a headless device. i highly recommend amd cpus (7600x) for rapid search and muse upsampling although i now run hqplayer on a separate pc. amd run cooler and use less power than intel. also quieter. look at noctua cooling. also 32GB ram. the 7600x supports ddr5 7200 ram. add a rtx 4070 super graphics card and you can run windows, roon and hqplayer for superior dsd512 upsampling. night and day compared to the nucleus.
note the same computer with potplayer and 8tb video ssd connected to your tv is also great for 4k video with nvidia high res and hdr. need a 750w psu.
happy christmas.
Sorry, David, but that was completely over my head. Except for the FYI part, after that you lost me.
Look into DietPi (Linux) with roon server. With your library you will probably not find a NuC that works great out of the box with ROCK.
Rock is kinda lagging anyway in performance compared to DietPi solutions.
You could also try a M4 Mac mini with 24gb ram and run roon server on that.
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