My Experience with ROCK

Roon Software Discussion ROCK
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QAs I just seemed to have completed a 4+ weeks odyssey to set up a Roon server using ROCK. My network is 100% Cat-6 or better wired with two un-managed network switches. I got a Intel NUC 13 Pro NUC13ANHi7 Barebone System - 13th Gen i7, and installed 128MB SSD and 8MB of memory, as specified in the recommendations from Roon.

I don’t use streaming services, but have a large library of music on two NAS devices.

The ROCK install went very smoothly, but as I started using the system and listening, it was snap, crackle, and pop, with eventual drop-outs, and then the app would stop talking to the server and never come back. The app had to be restarted. I checked the forums. I completely upgraded my network accordingly, and then isolated it to just the NUC, my NAS, and one switch - still lots of problems with the data stream (drop-outs, crackle like an LP).

It seemed like the NUC was laboring to keep up, even with 44kHz16bit content.

So, in a last ditch effort to get it working, I installed another 8MB of memory. Today it seems to be working correctly! But I am a little disappointed that I had to find this out.

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I suspect that, with a large library, audio analysis was consuming a lot of resources. Once that was complete, then playback would have settled down. The addition of 8MB [8GB] memory was probably a coincidence. If RoonOS doesn’t have sufficient memory for dealing with a large library, then it will simply crash.

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Interesting. It never crashed, as far as I could tell. But, but four weeks to finish audio analysis? It was on constantly, and I was trying to use it from day one.

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Did you give it cores to use or was it throttled in Settings\Library?

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I did the max as I’m constantly adding files…

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As you can see my library is quite a bit smaller compared to yours. However switching from Mac’s with 8 gb of RAM to a Lenovo laptop running on Linux with 16 gb of RAM did make quite a difference. Roon is RAM hungry for sure.

I have no experience with ROCK itself as I have always used my older systems for a Roon Server. My new one is a NUC, but I have no intention of installing ROCK on that. :slight_smile:

It took my Lenovo quite awhile as well analysing my local collection of music. Playback didn’t suffer from it though. And I didn’t change the speed setting either. As my Roon Server is running 24/7 it will eventually complete the job.

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I’ve got 32MB coming for my server. Hopefully that will do it.

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32 gb I hope? :wink: But yeah, that should go a long way. Going to 16 gb still leads to some laggy performance with the user interface on some occasions. But playback has never been an issue ever since my Roon Server has been connected to Ethernet. With my library Linux and Roon combined use close to 7 gb of RAM. So back on my Mac’s their memory would have been full all the time as MacOS is RAM hungry as well.