You know I love this idea. And you also know I’m not going to try it. But man, the scent of adventure.
That’s why I’m trying to get @Michael_Gyura to do it 
LOL! Someone’s got to be the guinea pig.
One major issue (for me) to bringing the core physically with me when I travel is that I would lose the ability to use the ARC app. So, that may kill off that idea before I even try.
Syncing the core also seems like there are lots of potential issues. And if I pull it off, would it violate the user agreement since I would essentially have two working cores for one subscription.
Most likely I’ll just setup two cores and call it good. But, if I get brave I’ll update the results here.
Something is going on with my mojo. I can’t seem to get anyone to do this. I think I’m better at convincing people to do things face to face. Especially with a whiteboard.
Someone will correct me if I’m wrong about this but I don’t think this proposal violates the license agreement since you’d only have one core active at any given time. I would expect Roon’s license management to kick in if you try to run them concurrently - if you run two or more cores using the same subscription, the remote apps will inform you of this and will allow you to revoke the license from one of them.
Forgot to say this earlier but “Welcome to the forum!”, @Michael_Gyura!
Yeah, I use two cores all the time, just never concurrently (because I can’t). And yes, it makes ARC annoying for me to use because I’m constantly resyncing. Which I sort of do for a while and then get annoyed. I’m guardedly optimistic they’ll let ARC ‘stick to’ an inactive core someday. But I’m definitely not going to believe with any of my heart that they’ll deal with dual core better than today.
Anyways, @Michael_Gyura definitely don’t worry - so long as you don’t have two cores active at the same time I know you don’t have an issue. What I don’t know is whether you can do the standard unauthorize other core thing given that your core is both the same, and different. You got me. No clue what will happen. But it’s not contra licensing, I THINK. At least it seems no different in spirit than folks who do what I do (one license, two cores) or what the folks do who carry a physical core back and forth. Somewhere in between.
Thank you all for your help. This is a very helpful group.
Sorry, I forgot to address this question.
Everything is loaded on the external drive. The container, music, and app.
I keep my music backed up in a few places, but my NAS currently isn’t running SSDs. I read in the Roon setup guide (I’m brand new to all things Roon) that SSDs are what’s needed to use an NAS as a core. I had an extra SSD external drive laying around so I figured I’d give it a try. It’s been in use for about a month without any issues.
If I do two separate cores, I think I’ll use a Mac Mini I have at the other house. It has a 2TB SSD, 64GB of ram, and the i9. So, it should be more than enough to drive the system. Otherwise I’ll either need to buy a Nucleus or an expansion unit for the Synology NAS.
Ugh, you are the master of the anti-sell sell. You may yet get me to try this, even though I mostly have had really bad experiences with docker (not that it doesn’t work, it played a major role in my career, just never had fingers on keyboard, and the concepts of virtualization are so foreign to me when it comes time to actually do stuff that I’m constantly second guessing myself) because I like to be pig-headed and this seems like a great opportunity.
Don’t mean to thread crap here, but with ARC isn’t this kind of moot now? I guess if you want to sync multiple endpoints in a second home, ARC doesn’t allow for that, but if you just want to get Roon on another system away from your core, all you need is an Android tablet on Wifi outputting to a USB DAC, no?
Yes. If your second home is single zone and doesn’t need DSP you’re all good now. Those of us who are on tag thread have different reasons. We are thread crap impervious.
You should definitely not try running Roon in Docker. The walkthrough I wrote is very hard to follow and is full of bugs. If it doesn’t work out well, you will never get that five minutes back again.
Kidding aside, I did recently go back from Roon on a NUC to Docker on Synology. My NAS is very capable of running Roon - that won’t be true for everyone. I couldn’t justify the additional machine and power use. On top of that, I’ve ZeroTier working well and that allows me to use Roon on my mobile devices, including a DAP, from outside the house. I couldn’t get that to work without co-locating Roon and ZeroTier on the same device.
Hmmmm…If you do decide to play with this, my recommendation would be to have an independent container on each NAS and move or sync the app and data directories between houses. That’s the most conservative approach. All Roon app bits live in the “app” folder. All of Roon’s stateful data, including configuration and the database, lives in the “data” folder.
Thinking about this a bit more, I think I have a better strategy that what I previously wrote for how to do the initial setup. If someone actually wants to give it all a try, let me know and I’ll explain what I’m thinking.
I transport my ROCK, it’s tiny and easy. However, in my household, I am the only person who uses Roon. I can see how it would be complicated if my wife and I each wanted to use Roon at the same time in two places…. Interesting discussion, I’m trying to resist taking on a project just for the sake of tackling a project!
Zerotier works.
It was easy to setup on a mix of x86 windows clients/‘Roonbridges’ (for headphone DSP and a fullrange/sub crossover/room correction DSP because Roon cannot host VST or any other industry standard audio processing plugins), a linux client/‘RAAT’ on an xPi with toslink out (Roon’s built-in DSP worked fine for room correction where it’s fed into an AVR to split 2.0 source into 2.1), and an x86 server/‘Core’ running a realtime Linux flavour linked to a now-ancient Synology RAID box/Qobuz/Tidal.
Occasionally there is a delay in connecting to the core, which goes away after either 10 seconds or so, or a reboot (via ssh). But I’ve had those issues locally too, so doubt whether zerotier has anything to do with it.
Hi, @Bertrandization - thanks for posting this.
Are you running ZeroTier on your core machine in Ethernet Bridge mode? I just want to confirm that you didn’t find some other way of getting this working. Thanks.
Random note…
I recently restored a backup of my main home ROCK to the ROCK at my second home, and started playing what I thought was local music. But it wasn’t local to the ROCK in my second home, it was a CIFS share, over an OpenVPN tunnel… the same smb://192.168.1.201/music was pointing to the share back at my primary home. It worked fine. Maybe a fraction of a second more to start playing but no gaps and nothing noticeable.
After letting it play for a while I pointed it to my NAS music mirror in my second home, because I have it here. But again, having a permanent site-to-site makes some things easier. I might try running like that again and see how much I really need the local mirror.
Still not ready to be the test case for @gTunes and his mad scientist Docker copy mayhem, but might be in my future when I need a project.
As I’ve said before - it’s probably a bad idea. I have more bad ideas than good ideas (references available upon request).
Plus, if I understand this thread correctly, you’ve gone deep into things like hacking your UDM Pro to try to get it to proxy UDP broadcasts. My Docker strategy involves the Docker GUI and a few minutes of work. A monkey could do it with the right walkthrough. So given your penchant for deep hacking, it’s probably not that interesting to you.
Thanks so much for this thread as I have been starting to think about schemes to accomplish library synchronization across locations. Of course, my laptop (which is issued by my employer) being my Roon master is easiest, and in fact my library importing starts on this machine and is then pushed up to one of my Synology NASs. That NAS then distributes the location to sister NASs primarily for back up reasons.
I have a Nucleus+ in our house. It sat in storage for a few years but is now back and running. The music storages in the NAS.
My thinking has been to have a Roon Nucleus in multiple locations and occasionally to back up my main Nucleus library to the other locations. It is good to hear others have this set up.
What I am wondering before I invest in additional hardware is the library storage location. I am guessing that for the database to be moved between sites that the storage path has to be the same in every location. Is that a correct assumption? How are people dealing with the storage locations in each of their library set ups?
(I recognize what I am describing would require the audio render end points to be redone regardless.)
I am also curious for those who are using their Nucleus as the storage location (either internally or with a USB drive) if they are able to easily push audio to this storage location from a NAS. Effectively, I would like to import or update music locally and have it appear in the Roon library without further intervention by me. (Even if this is not real-time - e.g. it happens hourly or daily.)
I am happy to start experimenting but of course any hints or tips are appreciated so I begin on a fruitful path.
Thanks!
Laird
PS I would also be perfectly happy to use Arc when I am not in the home with the Nucleus if there were a native Mac version.
PPS I supposed another option is to not use the Nucleus and rather just run the Roon library on a NAS in each location, likely with multiple licenses so they can all process simultaneously.
Current setup: one Roon core (Ubuntu Server, 4TB SSD) for each location, synchronized via Syncthing. This synchronizes local music files only, not Roon library data and history. I thought that would be annoying, but actually it’s not such a problem because I use a separate tag editor on the music files if I need to change metadata; and Qobuz favorites also synchronize across locations.
I have two NUCs as roon cores. One is at home, the other in my studio. Both have internal SSDs.
Both locations have a decent internet connection.
I keep my master music storage on a mac mini - this used to be my roon core at home until I switched to ROCK. I still use it to rip CDs and maintain any meta data. I then use Goodsync which recognises any changes and automatically replicates them to the internal drives on both the NUCs.
At home the mac mini and the NUC are on the same network - so I run ROCK on the NUC - and have Goodsync replicate via ROCK’s SMD support.
My studio NUC also used to run ROCK - but for the replication to work via good sync I needed a local machine running Goodsync - so it could replicate via the internet. I considered adding an extra machine in the studio but as a trial I switched the studio ROCK to run Ubuntu - so it can now run both Goodsync and my roon core.
The goodsync replication works really well. Running ubuntu on the studio NUC requires a bit more maintenance than running ROCK - but I’m pretty happy so far. It’'s all been running for about a year.
I’m sure it would also work with the ROCK drive as a master instead of a mac mini (the other reason I still use the mac mini is that I use time machine to back up my music safely).
I have goodsync setup to copy WIP mixes that I want to listen to from the studio mac to the home mac mini - from where they get replicated to my roon cores. I also have the home mac mini goodsync set up to replicate my music to an SD card (when inserted) for my Chord Poly, and an external USB - which I use in my laptop when travelling (I move the studio Roon license to my laptop when I need to).
I planned to regularly restore a roon backup onto the studio NUC - but since I don’t use roon playlists much, or maintain much meta data in roon - I haven’t done this often.
I keep evolving how I’m doing my multi-home sync, and experimenting. Now my second home is getting really out of date in everything except the library. Honestly, I have been listening to a lot of Plexamp at my second home (streaming from my home Plex server, combining Tidal & my library using their DJ functions, playing over my Ropieee’s). Saving me some cognitive hassle, and traversing my library more. Obviously still have Roon set up there, and do use it for “serious listening” on my primary sound system, but I find I do less of that when I’m there. ARC could be nearly as good, but it doesn’t get me traversing my system as much, and it’s a bit more finicky. However, my main home listening is still 80% Roon. Dunno. Keeps it interesting I suppose!