Looking to replace my Nucleus. Thinking of getting a new Mac mini. How difficult is it to install? Also what is the best way to migrate my local library from the Nucleus (1TB SSD) over to the Mac? Can I just get the stock Mac mini or do i need additional memory of faster processor. Any links would be appreciated. TIA
1 Like
I ran Roon Server 2.0 on my stock 8GB RAM M1 Mac Mini for several weeks. My library is over 45k about 36K local and the balance on Tidal. Some users recommend 16GB of RAM for large libraries, in examining memory use of Roon 2.0, memory never went over 3 GB.
I have a total of 8 endpoints and ran multiple endpoints concurrently with DSP running both local and Tidal streams without any issues.
As far as moving your library that will depend on whether the Nucleus houses the files on an internal or external drive. If it is external it will depend on how the drive is formatted, MacOs doesn’t read ext4 natively so you may need to copy the files to a drive formatted as Mac compatible (HFS, APFS, FAT etc).
Moving from one Roon Core to another requires restoring from the Roon database. Make sure you backup the database beforehand to a USB or drive the Mac can read then restore from that.
Here are Roon’s guidelnes for moving toe a new Core.
2 Likes
Thanks. music is stored on a internal SSD within the nucleus.
You’d need to copy or move it to a drive you can attach to the Mac via USB. I don’t know enough about the drive format in the Nucleus but I suspect its ext4 as the Nucleus uses a stripped down version of Linux.
Someone else may be able to chime in here to advise on moving the files.
1 Like
The Nucleus shares the drives on the network. On the Mac, navigate to the Nucleus’s storage SDD in Finder. That is, set it up as described here, but instead of copying the files to the Nucleus, copy them off it to the Mac:
Skip past the formatting part (!!) and go to this section:
SMB Connection (Alternate Option)
on this help page:
4 Likes
Can you just remove the SSD from the Nucleus and put it in a housing of some sort from Amazon? It would, of course, depend on how it is formated.
Yea i can try that. But not very IT savvy.
Most likely won’t work, macOS does not read normal Linux filesystems, the Nucleus is Linux-based.
1 Like
Yes. I had to reformat the SSD before installing into the Nucleus.
extFS (by Paragon Software) provides ext2, ext3 and ext4 compatibility (for Intel and Arm based Macs), and has a 10 day free trial, so sticking the SSD in an enclosure would probably work.
1 Like
But, probably not if it’s already formatted with the wrong format and loaded with music files. Or, does that allow you to read other formats? Looks like it does.
Might just be easier to reformat the drive and reload your music files from wherever you have them backed up.
extFS simply provides a filesystem driver, very much like the built-in ones that macOS has. Sure it can then read existing disks, also like the built-in ones. extFS is most likely good enough for reading the data off the Nucleus’s SSD after putting it into an enclosure. However, I am not sure that I would want to rely on it being sufficiently bug-free for using it for writing to the disk for extended time (i.e., using the Nucleus-formatted disk forever as an external storage)
However, as the data can easily be copied off the nucleus via the network as described above, I don’t know why one would bother with this complication.
It’ll work better than most as MacOS is linux based
It’s easy to copy stuff from a Nucleus to a Mac
No, it is not. It drew to some extent from BSD Unix and it has always had different filesystem organization from Linux.
1 Like
Stop your pettiness, you said it won’t copy.
It will.
The question in that particular thread was whether the Nucleus SSD could be taken out, put in a case, and connected to the Mac. I was trying to prevent a potentially disastrous mistake. I said nothing about copying from one filesystem to the other. And BTW, because of filename differences, and SMB issues, a copy from one of these filesystems to the other can be inexact. But sure, call attention to detail “petty.”
Where did he ask about removing a SSD? think the clue was “migrate”
I asked the question. Come on guys, don’t turn every thread into a huge argument.
5 Likes
The ‘best way’ is to copy the music files from the Nucleus, over the network, to a USB drive attached to the Mac, and formatted exFAT. However, there files should be backed up somewhere anyway, perhaps you can just clone the backup?
Format external music drives with exFAT, this way they’re compatible with Windows, Mac, and Nucleus (as an external drive). A Nucleus internal drive is formatted ext4, which is not readable by Windows/Mac without the help of additional third party software.
3 Likes
And it won’t copy from a disk that is ext4 formatted because macOS has zero to do with Linux and, most importantly, out of the box does not support the ext4 file system.
Copying over the network is easiest