Years ago, I ripped all of my CDs to iTunes (ALAC). My first streamer was a Squeezebox pointed at the music library on my Mac. When Roon first came out, I built a Rock with its own storage. I move music from my Mac music library (many hard drives later) to my Roon Rock using Carbon Copy Cloner. My system works fine, but feels inelegant.
Even though I don’t really use the Mac Music / iTunes app to listen to music, I do still use it to move music to my iPhone, etc. as I don’t use any streaming services. I also buy a lot of digital music from sites like Bandcamp, which means I need to download files, then upload to Roon. Are you Mac users still using iTunes, or are there better options our there. To the PC users, are there music library apps you like that support ALAC?
Finally, I have too many computers. As mentioned, I run Roon on a dedicated Rock. I have a Mac Mini that is basically a paper weight with a media archive drive (music & photos). I have a gaming pc, which could/should host all my media. Finally, I have a MacBook Pro, which is the computer I use 90% of the time.
I’d like to cut the Mini and iTunes out of the chain, but am not sure if Roon alone can account for the rest. Thoughts?
I used to use iTunes/Music daily until a little over a month ago. I have about 10000 tracks ripped from CD’s. The last couple of years I stopped buying music as I have an Apple Music subscription as part of Apple One.
Although I was fairly happy, I was frequently confronted with things being changed in my library and finally had enough. A little over a month ago I started a Roon trial. I haven’t looked back, and haven’t used iTunes/Apple Music since.
I signed up for Qobuz Sublime and started buying music again.
I have my Roon Core running on a NAS. I download the newly purchased music to my MacBook after which I move it to a mounted share on my NAS. It never enters my Apple Music library.
For music on my iPhone I’m using Roon ARC. Although you can stream from your core to ARC while away from home, I’m created a playlist that I downloaded on ARC. When opening the ARC app, it automatically syncs new entries I added to the playlist. I haven’t checked what happens when I remove a track from the playlist.
That being said, I don’t see any reason why you would still need iTunes if Roon has all the music you want.
I’ve experimented with Arc a few times (need a good wifi connection). But are you saying that Arc can download playlists (actual song files) for offline listening? I’m mainly thinking of flights where wifi connections are never very good. Cheers!
Yes. That is what I’m saying. But it only works for tracks that are stored on your core. I.e. the ones you have purchased and downloaded. It does not work for anything that’s you’ve simply added from Tidal or Qobuz.
At least that is how ARC is reporting it… I have read various posts where people state that ARC needs a connection to the core. Unfortunately I don’t know how often that is.
