how long did it take you to rip all those CDs? (Gotta be 20,000 CDs, yeah?)
Ripping 10 a day every day would take six years!
I think people testing Roon and end up not liking it is OK - and why not share the experience? I however suspect the main problem for most people testing is that the time to get to know the system is too short.
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Nah, like I said … it’s “only” about 12.000 … give or take a couple hundred. A lot of those are rare trailer music libraries. Some of those libraries have about 60-100+ CDs each with 5-50 tracks that are only a minute or so long. These contributed A LOT to the big numbers. When I started ripping CDs back in … omg … 94 or 95 I think it took a whole night to rip and encode an entire album. At the time I already had about 2000+ CDs when I decided to store them in digital form. Then in the early 2000s I started collecting trailer music and spent a fortune on ebay to get the originals. That’s when things really exploded.
For years things went at a horribly slow pace. Eventually I built a linux based machine with 4 drives which made things go MUCH faster and I didn’t bother to encode anymore. Instead I started buying hard drives … lots of hard drives. That got out of hand quickly and so I started encoding in FLAC and I am doing that to this date and I am far from done. Also, at some point I decided to download albums I had in my collection to save myself the troubles of ripping everything. That helped a lot too but eventually I just started buying music digitally when FLAC became widely available at online music stores.
That’s basically how you get a music library this big. I could probably write a book about all the troubles and problems along the way because just editing the tags in the early days was painfully slow. There was no musicbrainz or anything. At first there were no tags at all. I don’t even remember when I started editing tags but it quickly became a horrible chore so I stopped doing it and just made sure I picked folder names and trees that made sense (to me) so I could find what I was looking for.
You can imagine that listening to music like that gets rather frustrating and tedious and so over time it was more about collecting music and no longer listening to most of it. Roon changed all that. It took the Nucleus+ quite a while to index everything and I am still making adjustments and changing the way I store my music but I am hoping that, over time and with Roon’s help, I will be on top of things. I am already enjoying my collection much more than I ever did, thanks to Roon.
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I did 3000+ CDs (full LPs) about 10-12 years ago, maybe longer
I had 3 grunty PCs, two of them had two drives - so 5 drives in all and I tried to keep them all going
I felt like a circus plate spinner 
I was working from home a lot - but still took me weeks
Back then HDD space was expensive, so initially a lot of so so discs were MP3 VBR, many were 320kbs, and faves were FLAC
After that epic task, every new CD was immediately FLAC’d for home listening and 320kbs MP3’d for mobile use
My CDs are in boxes in the attic now
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I did the same thing, but had one PC with 5 cd drives in it running 5 instances of EAC to FLAC. I would load the drives when I got up in the morning, and get a shower etc, then reload them after breakfast on the way to work. Then I’d reload when I got home, then after taking the dogs for a walk, then after dinner, then before bed. etc. rinse repeat… It was horrible and I only had about 1200 CD’s.
I’m still tweaking and tidying metadata 18 years later.
I’m now toying with scanning the 1200 cd’s liners. Then I come to my senses.
I too keep a lossless library and a lightly compressed MP3 library for the phone, car, and iPod at work.
Sheldon
Years ago I sent all my CDs off to a ripping service. FLAC and 320mp3. Worth Evey penny. All tagging the same.
I did it once myself and about 3/4 of the way through had HDD failure and no backups. Lesson learned. Couldn’t fathom starting over
One of my customers has 750,000 tracks. He has no problems with Roon. He is using our i9 sonicTranporter so he has the fastest CPU in the world to do lookups in the Roon database.
He tells me search is a bit slow but not to bad considering the library size. He loves Roon and the sonicTransporter.
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My library is pretty much identical. 16.717 albums, 250.790 tracks - it took a day to convert from Sooloos to Roon and ever since, works flawlessly with my Nucleus + and a QNAP Nas. 6 zones, combining zones works fine (except live radio that has a delay). Qobuz and Tidal - all seamless.
We also have 2 or 3 Nucleus+ (slightly upgraded) user with over a million tracks!
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FWIW, IIRC, @danny remarked somewhere that SSD latency wasn’t a generally advertised metric, and could be a factor - could that be something worth a look in that specific case ?
We use a Samsung NVMe to store the Roon database. It’s rated at 3,500MB/s. That defiantly helps make it run Roon faster with a large db.
Here’s the post I was thinking about.
Here’s a comparison, on the metric @danny says matters most for Roon, of the latest-spec Samsung and the competition.
@agillis and I talk often. Of all the manufacturers that make servers, he’s the one I trust the most to get right. He understands what makes Roon perform quite well and his component choices are outstanding.
While he does sell a competing product to our own Nucleus, he has my endorsement 100%.
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I’ve bought several units over the last almost 10 years from @agillis (going back to the “vortexbox” days). Always good quality with outstanding support.
Great to hear.
Would better random access make a difference in search speeds for edge cases like the one @agillis described ?
Not if you already have a recent Samsung NVMe drive in there…
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@Xekomi The 4k random read test you linked to pauses until a read request completes before issuing the next one, keeping the queue depth at 1. That doesn’t sound typical of any modern app to wait on i/o completion for small reads, and even if so, with a database backend, it will read ahead. Perhaps the next two benchmarks with sustained random reads and greater queue depths are more representative of roon’s i/o.
@danny, what’s the “metric [that] matters most” in storage devices that @agillis is referring to?
Thanks,
- Eric
We use top of the line MVMe drives from Samsung in our music servers. This keeps Roon running very fast.
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I have over 300,000 tracks and use your I5 system optique . It has been an amazing upgrade for me. I will get a top flight DAC shortly to complete the jump in experience. But ROON and your Sonic Transporter and my over 20 years of ripping is paying amazing dividends. I have nearly tapped out my 8TB drive though!