New Roon hardware for very large libraries

Agreed! but that’s how I’ve ditched my cd player. A valve Cary audio player. Nucleus was better.

So is it better to plug a hard disc via USB?

yes it is.

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I run my Roon Core off my unRAID server in a docker. It’s an older chipset but plenty of power, just an i7 4770. I have 23 TB of storage to tap into. :smiley:

That much ram in a nucleus is going to waste. We have users with a million+ tracks and they don’t cross 32gb.

Something funny is up with your setup if it’s providing a bad experience at 500k tracks. My guess is the storage solution.

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You are probably right! Someone suggested to connect to nucleus via USB.

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unRAID server … Brave man : )

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Yes, I’d definitely add a disk to the Nucleus.

Did you read this thread?

Well, valve. I’m not surprised.

I have it doing a lot. It runs a Windows VM, Plex, Wireguard and a few applications related to Plex in addition to Roon. A multipurpose home server is the way to go. I have that always running and I do my work off of a laptop which I can then dock at my desk when I feel like sitting in my office. If I ever need to run a long batch job or do something a little computationally expensive I’ll spin up my Windows VM and RDP into it. It’s a great setup.

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Thanks for the suggestion!! My nucleus plus is still running. At about 400.000 to 450.000 tracks it was fairly smooth, no noticeable issues there . But now getting close to 500.000 is getting heavy … might be my NAS I don’t know… I have to try the USB solution as suggested here.

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You could purchase a second Nucleus to run a second Roon core on your single Roon license. Use internal and/or USB drives and split your music library in half between the two. Swltch back and forth at will to listen to your desired music.

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What specific behaviors are you trying to address? You’ve said that you “can feel that my nucleus is starting to get overwhelmed by the size of the library” and that it “is getting heavy”. In practice, how does this show up and impact your experience?

Your music lives on your NAS but the database that drives the user experience lives on your Nucleus. As far as I know, your NAS is involved in library import/analysis and local tracks will stream from there when being played. But if you believe that you are seeing issues with using the app to explore, browse, select, manage, etc. then I don’t think you can point the finger at your NAS.

Someone mentioned that a USB hard drive might be preferable to your NAS. The point they were making is that Roon may have issues detecting changes when you add or remove files to your library. This is a valid point. If the issue you are having is that you add a file and Roon doesn’t immediately see it, and that’s a big enough issue for you to want to move to a different storage solution, then it’s worth considering. But I personally think the RAID and scale benefits of a NAS are hard to beat and for a library as large as yours, it seems like a reasonable approach.

For what it’s worth, your library is huge and will create real-time change notifications for use about anything you try to do with it on a Synology (or most unix systems). This is because you hit what’s called the “inotify limit”. This can be adjust on a Synology NAS but I don’t know if/how that impacts the Synology SMB service seeing changes to your library. If the issue you are having is “I add a file to my library and Roon doesn’t see it” and not “The Roon app is slow”, then adjusting inotify might help I can point you at info on how to do that.

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Isn’t it possible to go for Quobuz or Tidal, see what stuff is there and put all of that music which is available as stream into a cold storage USB drive and keep only that which is unavailable?

Just an idea.

My library is around 700,000 tracks and I use the nucleus + with 16 GB RAM as my core while storing the library on a QNAP; works well

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Hi! Thanks for your reply! May I ask how do you connect to the nucleus? Are there switches in-between with your NAS.

I’m facing latency when I search songs or albums, and sometimes total failure and I have to repeat the process.

Sometimes the playback is slow to respond.

It’s a good idea! Thanks!!

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Hi, I’m facing latency when I search songs or albums, and sometimes total failure and I have to repeat the process.

Sometimes (lately even more so) the playback is slow to respond.

Saying that, new music when added is almost found every time so no problems there. I think my biggest problem is proceeding the info when used as a search engine which lately happens with total failures. This is a very important aspect of my usage when I want to locate stuff in my collection.

Maybe your problems are originated in Roon’s move into the cloud. I think the search function is now completely cloud based. That might explain the lame response you encounter.

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Thanks I’ll have to check this. As soon as I return since I’m away at the moment.