Just over a year with roon now and very happy but I have issues that are causing me grief. I’m running a Mac mini (i3 4gbRam 500gb HDD) as a core and using an iPad or MacBook pro as a remote. I have four Bluesound endpoints two NAD MDC v2 cards (M32 and DD390) and two Pulse Mini2i speakers everything is hard wired on home plugs except one of the Pulse minis and the mini which are wireless.
Everything works flawlessly until the mini needs an input for some update or information I need to acknowledge, it needs rebooting because roon loses tidal or just decides it needs rebooting and its old and slow at rebooting (just like me)
I set it to turn off at midnight and back on at 8am so rebooting itself once a day and that reduced the problem of missing core a lot but still its once or twice a week its “looking for core” a real first world problem you’ll agree.
So I’m looking to change the core I’m thinking bluesound Vault, can roon be installed on that? or a newer mini (which could do double duites as a desktop) or one of the fancier NAS drives?
Would this solve the glitches or is rebooting the modern equivalent of the HB pencil in the cassette tape?
The device Roon is virtually devised to run on is a NUC. Put your music on a second drive, back it up to a portable drive and you have a pretty robust system. There is always the possibility there are other issues at play but a NUC, ROCK and on board or USB attached storage is optimal and if you are sticking with Roon you might as well go all in.
It’s really not that hard. Putting the Nuc together takes 10 minutes. Making the changes to the BIOS to get proper boot order can be a little confusing because Roon’s instructions on how to do so are not consistent with current 8th generation Nucs. That said, everyone gets through it and feels good about having done it themselves. If you run into issues or have questions, the Roon Community is ready to help.
If ROCK simply seems too daunting, you can load Windows 10, but then you are back to the update dance.
I would bite the bullet and go with ROCK on a NUC. It may seem more trouble right now because of new things to learn during the setup, but once setup, it should end up as pretty much zero trouble afterwards.
As other have said, if you run into problems, there are enough helpful people here who have done it and yes there are quite a few things to do, but none of them are complex if the instructions are followed.
The thing is - most of us probably havn’t done it more than once unless they upgraded to a better NUC as once setup as it just never needs to be fiddled with again.
It’s probably also worth saying if you want a completely no muss, no fuss system optimized for Roon you should consider a Nucleus as an option. It’s more expensive than putting together a Nuc but it’s ready to go when you get it, it updates itself and you manage it (when you need to) with a super simple web UI. You can also put an SSD in it to hold all your music if you want.
Depending on the size of your library, how many endpoints you have and whether you want to use DSP, you might be better off with an i5 NUC, about $200 more.
BTW - If you can follow directions, putting on ROCK is fairly straightforward. On the other hand, I’ve never has any update problems running Core on WIN 10.
NUC = Next Unit of Computing; an Intel marketing term. Basically, it’s a compact PC, suitable for many roles from desktop PC to music appliance (what the Roon Nucleus is).