Keeping roon running even when os sleeps

1

Still doing my eval on my MacOS laptop. One problem is that if I close my laptop everything goes to sleep so at best only the current track plays and remote can’t connect. Is there an elegant way to keep roon awake. I assume I could use caffeinate (-w option), but that’s a bit awkward because I have to find the process ID and then run caffeinate each time. If I do that are these the processes I have to caffeinate?
$ ps -eaf | grep Roon
501 90046 1 0 Mon06PM ?? 124:05.14 /Applications/Roon.app/Contents/MacOS/Roon
501 90055 90046 0 Mon06PM ?? 0:27.63 /Applications/Roon.app/Contents/MacOS/RAATServer

Is there a better way?

Thanks!

3

How should anything run if the laptop sleeps? There is an app Amphetamine to prevent the Mac from sleeping that might be smoother than caffeinate.

Or try this maybe:

Else you need a separate Roon Core of some kind that runs the Roon server independently

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4

On Windows laptops, there’s an option in the power settings to just lock the UI and not go to sleep when the lid is closed. I’m using that with my media server. Not sure if Macs have something similar.

5

Go to Apple Menu>System Settings…>Displays>Advanced…>Battery & Energy and switch on “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off”. That might work.

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6

Yes, I need the laptop to be awake. Letting it stay awake even when the display is off probably works (in Big Sur, the last update I could do on the laptop, it’s on the battery page). However that’s not great since it means my laptop can never go to sleep, even if roon isn’t running. Amphetamine looks nice - caffeinate on steroids! I just downloaded that, along with the enhancer to make sure closing the laptop will not put things to sleep, and it’s looking good.

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7

Don’t worry. My M1 MacBook is my roon core since Dec 2021 and it’s online 24/7 . Amphetamine and hardwired. With most background activity stuff deactivated

8

Good to know. I’ve got mine running 24/7 on an older MacBook (2.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5). Occasionally it stalls between tracks, but I think that’s only when I’m simultaneously doing something else of significance on the laptop. My plan is to get a new MacBook someday and just keep the old one running Roon and nothing else.

Have you found the M1 is capable of running Roon and other major applications at the same time?

9

I had roon running while upsampling to DSD256 + external 4k monitor with YouTube, while extracting DSD files from sacds Isos with a external Nvme SSD.

No issue really. But there is some occasions where roon will lose connection to a endpoint if you do a software update or download something from Google drive with safari .

But I think most are bugs that are connected to other apps. Normal usecase I have 99% zero issue’s

And my M1 has only 8gb ram. Probably much better with 16gb

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10

I’m running Roon on a 16GB M1, alongside plenty of other apps (Photoshop, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc) and it works pretty much flawlessly. Occasionally, if I overstretch the network connection (much as @MarcMarc mentioned) it might skip a beat or two, but other than that it works well.

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