Mac Mini for Roon server with large music library

Roon Software Discussion
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Hi, I’m about to make the plunge and buy a Roon server.

I’m thinking of a Mac Mini, and wondering how much power and RAM I need.

I have a very large music library, upwards of 250k songs, and would like Roon to operate smoothly. Looking at an M4, but should I max it out or does it become overkill at some point?

Anyone have any experience with Mac Minis and large libraries?

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That would be a lot of money when it could be done at a fraction of the price using a Intel/Asus Nuc i7/32GB ram and whatever storage meets your requirements.

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Would it? In the UK, a Mac Mini M4 with 24GByte of DRAM and 512GB of SSD storage is availble for £999 on the Apple web store.

Similarly, in the UK, a NUC13ANHi7 will cost upwards of £600 (the 14th gen variants even more for non-ROCK use) with no RAM and No SSD. By the time you have added SSD and RAM, you are looking at £700 or more.

Yes, this is cheaper - but a ‘fraction of the cost’? Well, only in a purely mathematic sense.

I would say that between these two systems, the price difference is not that significant. The buyer should buy whatever they are more comfortable with. If they are comfortable with MacOS, then the Mac mini M4 is a good choice. If they are comfortable with ROCK or linux (or Windows but that will cost more) and not so comfortable with MacOS, then perhaps they should go the NUC route.

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You are choosing the minimum tool for the job, whether you go Apple Silicon or Intel.
I have a similar library, and while it runs very smooth on both my MacMini M4 (16Gb) and my NUC13i3 Pro (Nucleus Titan hardware) i still prefer my headless Windows server, Intel i5 11400-32GB which has an edge on the smaller brethren.

If you see your library grow further, my reccy is a desktop processor, if it’s reasonably mature in size, by all means, get an Apple Mac Mini if you feel comfy that way. The NUC13i3 is less costly, but not significantly, and the ability to as an appliance (Roon ROCK) would be my primary choice.

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Thanks for the comments. Yes, I’m a Mac user and prefer to stick with that OS. Speed tests I’m seeing seem pretty equivalent between PCs and Mac M4s, so I’m unsure what makes it a ‘minimum tool’ for the job. But I’m new at this, maybe I’m missing something. My main question is more to do with details. Is 24GB of DRAM enough? 512 SSD? Is processing power more essential than RAM? Would I see a benefit with the M4 pro chip? What would be the recommended specs? Thank you!

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Roon benefits from single core performance. No advantage with the pro.

I’m also using a base m4

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Yes, the M4 is a great processor, it is mighty powerful for it’s power consumption, but it’s still designated for portable devices/and low power consumption. The NUC Intels are also all laptop CPU’s.

What i’m getting at is that 250K tracks is fine with these, but somewhere a bit over that and you will need a desktop CPU for their single core performance and comparatively huge clock rates. The applications optimized for multi core usage make better use of the M4’s architecture, Roon doesn’t.

This is also highly dependent on the properties of your library.
Some things that tend to be performance driving:

  • large proportion of unidentified albums
  • folders/albums/playlists with many files
  • huge number of albums by a single artist
  • etc etc

Also, how many Zones do you drive? DSP/PEQ/MUSE?

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