Dylan,
Thanks for following up. I don’t think I’m ready to try to follow a guided troubleshoot from Roon yet. There are a lot of basic setup optimizations that I think can be done to the Mac Mini, and other MAC OSX system administration to be done first. I tried to find as much information as possible in the Roon knowledge base for prevention of dropouts and other setup related issues for Mac OS, but I could not find very much information. I might be looking in the wrong place.
But, there are some very good suggestions from other sources. Roon user Occamsrazor has suggested that the Mac Mini would benefit from an HDMI emulator dongle when running headless. I think this has a lot of potential and I am going to try it. Even if it just improves VNC, at least I’ll be able to see what’s going on better.
Mojo Audio offers a Mac OSX optimization guide and specifically addresses the Mac Mini here at this link. https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/optimizing-os-x-for-audio-video/.
In any case, there are so many basic things that I can look at first. It would be nice to find more information that is Roon specific, but that’s not really necessary.
For example, I cannot find any technical description of the transfer of audio files from the Roon Server to the Roon Bridge or any settings to change buffering of these files on the Roon Bridge. I think most network issues are easily solved if audio files can be loaded to memory before playback begins, but this might not be possible with a streaming.
Or, maybe it looks like this question has been answered in this Forum thread. End Device and Buffering.
I appears RAAT likes to keep audio file transfer from the Server to the Bridge synchronous to playback and offers no user configuration settings for audio file buffering. This would suggest to me that network stability is very important to Roon. Personally, I like the idea of waiting a few seconds for a file to buffer, but I’m sure there are reasons why this is not optimal for Roon given the architecture for DSP, etc.
I hope to have some useful results to share with the Mac Mini configuration.
Cheers,
Jamie