MAC OS Catalina - Roon core is not accessing my files stored on an external hard drive

Dear support team,

May I ask you to provide an indication by when I could expect an update of the roon core software for MAC OS Catalina? Does a workaround exist in the meantime? Many thanks in advance.

Best regards
Fred

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Hi,

I’m in the same boat too and am eager to get things back on track.

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Hi @Fred_Schuchhardt,

Please see Mike’s post here:

We don’t have any further updates at this time but we’ll be sure to keep you updated as soon as we have information to provide.

Thanks,
Dylan

We need another update from Roon.

It’s something to do with the renaming of iTunes. My HD tracks folder on the same external drive works fine under Catalina.

My last post was wrong my HD music folder is on the internal Mac Mini dirive running Catalina, no problem. iTunes is on an external drive.

Although I was frustrated when I learned (the hard way) that Roon wouldn’t access USB music drives in Catalina, I have since used this as an opportunity to do a bit of library cleansing.

Several years ago, I replaced the hard drive in the Mac mini that I use exclusively to run RoonServer with a 250GB SSD which will not hold my personal music collection.

Upon further thought, I realized that there wasn’t a lot in my ripped/purchased library that wasn’t available on either Qobuz or Tidal, and mostly in higher resolution since a lot of my library had been ripped years ago at lower bit rates.

So, I migrated music that I knew wasn’t available in either of the streaming services to a folder in my Dropbox account on the Mac mini SSD drive. I have revisited the process a couple of times as I think of something new, but it has been a relatively painless process. I now consider it to be a logical migration to high quality streaming.

I donated over 5000 LPs to the local university library in around 2000, and divested myself of most of my CDs just this past year when we downsized residences. Many of the CDs (about 2500) have better sounding alternatives available to stream. Some do not, but I can’t tell you when I last played a piece of physical media. Technology changes, and I firmly believe that streaming is the future. There is a great deal of music available to stream that has long been out of print, and certainly enough to occupy me for my lifetime.

As to artist revenues from streaming vs album purchases, please consider that only since the 1970s have album sales been a primary source of artist income. And even then, artists had to tour to support album releases and most incurred a lot of the costs involved with making records. Prior to that, artists played gigs and relied on radio airplay for popularity and income. There are damn few FM tuners in use today, and they were a primary music source only a generation ago. While I believe that we don’t support the arts as well as we should, the cheese is constantly moving. If you really want to support an artist, purchase directly from them, subscribe to their streaming services, go to their gigs, or send a donation.

While I believe that the Roon team’s communication could have been better regarding the Catalina issue (I believe that Roon still professes to support OSX in all versions above v. 10.8 on the marketing website), for me the primary strength/appeal of Roon is bit-perfect playback to multiple locations using RAAT and Roon Bridge and the tight integration with Qobuz and Tidal.

YMMV, but for me, looking at the glass as half-full, life is good.

BW

It’s rare there is an album on Qobuz or Tidal that has a better mastering than the CD I have in my collection. A quality mastering is more important than higher resolution. So I would not be happy exchanging my CDs for online content.

Catalina broke file sharing off external disks in general :-(. I got Audirvana working in the meantime by turning on NETBIOS for samba (Catalina turns this off by default). No reason why I should need NETBIOS for mac to mac sharing. So Apple broke some things big time. Link to NETBIOS info:

Roon support… does the beta Catalina 10.15.1 update fix or is this something deeper?

Fix is out.

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Dear DEV-Team,

many thanks! I am back on stage! It works! Fantastic.

Best regards from Munich, Fred

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