Just got started on 14 days trial, few questions please

Support
1

Hello,

Last night i started my 14 days adventure with Roon.

I’m primarily coming from listening music on Mac Mini using AUDIRVANA PLUS 2 with DACs OPPO HA-1 and Meridian Explorer2 with latter used for MQA decoding.

Recently i have purchased HQPlayer to run on Windows PC which has nvidia CUDA offload. So far, use of HQPlayer and its library have been “okay”, focusing on the function over form. I’ve accepted what HQPlayer can do over its limited UI and music library management capability, so, i’m content with its current UI.

However i’ve been looking at a replacement UI for managing music in frontend and using HQPlayer as playback with my DACs.

All my music files are stored in NAS device.

For the trial i have decided to install Roon in the same PC as the HQPlayer.

So, on with my trial of Roon.

Starting off was straightforward with installation, just point Roon at my NAS music folder, “\\10.0.0.155\media\music” path.

Went to bed.

And this morning, Roon said i have 54773 tracks. Cool.

I started to look into the Settings to see what i can customize. And in the Setup tab, i noticed following under Background Audio Analysis Speed.

It seems to be stuck in “Analyzing: 2 / 54773”.

And been there for most of today. Is this normal?

Nonetheless, move on with the trial.

Then i looked in the playlist to see how i can construct my playlists as i do with AUDIRVANA PLUS 2, grouping musics of same format, eg. DSD64, DSD128, DSD256, PCM >=88KHz, and so on.

And i am just not finding how do i setup smart playlists in Roon to go fetch me the musics that fall into certain media formats.

Is this not doable with current Roon?

That’s all for now.

What’s important is, will i notice any difference in the playback from Roon to HQPlayer to DAC to headphone to my ears. What i hear is what’s important, I can overlook the clunkyness having to deal with two separate programs for Roon - HQPlayer integration.

On with using Roon and HQPlayer together.

Thanks much!

2

To restrict to media in certain formats, choose “Albums” from the menu on the left of the window. At the top of the resulting album screen there is a button next to “Play All” named “Focus”. In that you can restrict based on genre, year, how recently played, file format, etc etc. Be sure to scroll to the left to reveal all the options in the Focus area.

You can also focus the inverse of whatever you select by clicking one of the focus tags at the top of the window after you choose it (it will turn from green to red).

Hope that helps!
-mike

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3

There are some known issues with analysis right now that we’re working on.

You may have some luck by turning analysis off and on again, but if you’re consistently getting stuck just flag @support and we’ll grab some logs from you. Usually, it means we hit a file and got stuck :confused:

We’re working on some expanded options here as well, but the current functionality is described here. Enjoy!

4

Set audio analysis to off and then set to fast.
I do this all the time…it’s buggy.

5

Thank you all. I’m not letting these obstacles slow me down in this trial. My goal is to determine the playback is no worse off than playing my DSD256’s using HQPlayer library scheme. And if no difference, then i’m ready to be lifetime member of Roon.

6

Yes, that sequence worked, and now at 1513 / 54768.

7

In the Storage tab, for my NAS music folder shows,

Connected
Watching for new files in real time
54773 Tracks Imported

I would like to try disabling the real time monitoring of new files, and i’ll force rescan.

How do i do that?

If i choose “Disable” will that do the job? Or, “Disable” will completely disconnect my NAS music folder?

8

Disabling a Watched folder in the Storage tab stops Roon from using that folder when viewing your library. That isn’t what you are trying to achieve.

In the Setup tab you can alter the speed of background analysis but you can’t turn it off completely. You can turn off on-demand analysis, which will stop Roon performing analysis on an unyet analysed track if you play it. If you turn off on-demand analysis, background analysis will continue at the speed selected.

If you want to test what Roon sounds like with no analysis occurring, move the test files you will use to a new Watched folder called Test or similar (make sure to move files, don’t copy, we don’t want the database to see two copies), disable your NAS music folder (this will stop analysis), wait for Roon to finish any analysis on the Test folder (probably not required) then conduct your tests.

After you have finished testing you can move files back and re-enable your NAS folder. This will start the analysis count again at 1/(unanalysed files). It should not restart analysis of previously analysed files, but there is a possibility that could occur. If that would be unacceptable and you want to test without analysis then it would be best to wait for analysis to complete on the NAS.

9

Well, this morning the Background Audio Analysis (set at Fast last night) was at 6317 / 54828.

And it seems to be stuck there for hours.

I see that this analysis is meant for volume leveling, crossfade and waveform displays.

I don’t use volume leveling with HQPlayer integration. I don’t think volume leveling is meant to be used with HQPlayer integration.

And i don’t use crossfade with HQPlayer integration. And i recall crossfade with HQPlayer integration should not be used.

That leaves me the waveform display.

I’ll try this again, set this audio analysis to off, and set to fast again and see how far the 3rd time will go.

10

Okay, set to off and Fast again, and starts to move again.

At least picks up from where it left off.

Perhaps this re-start is what is continuously needed.

11

Hello,

Is there a (hidden ???) way to get the Locations of the tracks in the NAS storage path?

12

Okay, find it here,

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13

Am i correct from research and readings that Roon currently DO NOT support SACD ISO’s?

14

Yes. You are correct. There is a feature request thread with some discussion about what would be involved in adding ISO support.

15

@support

At this time i’m consistently getting stuck.

Please help to grab some logs.

16

Hi @George_Shin ---- Thank you for the follow up and my apologies for the troubles here. I would like to grab some logs from you and will be contacting you via PM momentarily with instructions. Thanks!

-Eric

17

So, i’m winding down on my trial of Roon.

I’ve done as much listening as i can, and also comparing Roon + HQPlayer (always upsamping to DSD256 of everything) on Windows 10, against Audirvana on Mac Mini (also upsampling, but only to DSD128, since Mac lacks the ASIO driver for driving OPPO HA-1 using native DSD256), playback of as much high quality high res materials i can find, eg. mostly from the 2L recordings.

OPPO HA-1 is paired with OPPO PM-1 headset, balanced cables all the way.

At the end of the day, my ears (at age 51), i can hardly tell the difference between these two player setup, although on Mac, i do play MQA contents through Meridian’s Explorer2 DAC, and some MQA recordings do sound, to me, better than their DSD128/256 and PCM 24/352 equivalents. It just does.

I suppose i’m left with only one remaining “gap” with Roon, which is, “what do i do with all of my sacd ISO contents” ???

I have so much of these ISO contents, and Audirvana just works to playback these files.

Do i go on good faith, knowing “eventually” Roon “must” support playing back of ISO’s???

-gshin

18

It’s not a question of good faith, I can’t recall the devs ever indicating that ISO support is on the roadmap or likely to be implemented. I read Danny’s response in the Feature Request thread referred to above to mean that it was unlikely Roon would do the non-trivial work to support ISO in circumstances where ISO files can readily be converted to DSF.

So I would suggest converting your ISO files to DSF.

19

Okay, thanks.

I haven’t done this sort of conversion from ISO to DSF.

Quick search in Google shows several different approaches including using foobar2000.

If there is any particular approach that works “better” with Roon, then please do share.

I suppose starting with foobar2000 is as good as any.

Thanks much.

20

@George_Shin - have you read this thread: Converting SACD ISOs to DSF - Best Practice ? Might be interesting for you.

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