Not sure if this is the right place to post this as much of this thread is over my head However, since I am sure someone will move it to the right place, I’ll go ahead.
Currently running Roon on a dedicated headless Mac Mini which is getting long in the tooth (2012 vintage) and will need replacement soon. The Mini is controlled from a Mac laptop or an iPad. It is attached to my USB DAC (Playback designs). Music resides on an internal drive (high res) as well as 2 external USB drives (one containing mp3s and the other normal AIFF). I use iTunes to rip my CDs currently, as well as load stuff on my iPod. I am also able to get music off the Mini using Airplay or Wifi (have more Macs on the network, as well as a Zeppelin and a Mu-So). Finally, I backup the music drives on drives attached to my iMac that accesses the Mini over the Wifi.
I was waiting for the next Mac mini version to upgrade, but Rock and NUCs have intrigued me. I guess a NUC is a non-Apple equivalent to the Mini. Rock will replace the Mac OS with something dedicated to running Roon optimally, which is fine by me as I practically only the mini as a file server running Roon.
Questions:
1- How does one control the NUC running Rock? Do you have to tie up a screen/keyboard/mouse? Or can you do it remotely with a laptop (Mac preferably) or iPad?
2- Will it see the other devices on the Wifi (Macs, Laptops, Mu-So, Zeppelin etc…) ? Will I be able to get music ‘served’ off it to other devices?
3- Will I be able to backup the drives on a remote computer?
4- How do you get music on it? Will it be able to run CD ripping software? How about downloaded music?
I presume it won’t run iTunes and I’ll have to use one of my other devices to load my iPod?
Thanks for any clarifications and apologies for the level of ignorance
I’ll answer your questions below, but most of your questions are actually about Roon, and not ROCK + NUC. Think of ROCK + NUC as a machine dedicated as an appliance for running RoonServer and nothing else.
You use Roon! Roon works on and give near identical functionality on Windows and Mac laptops, or iPads and Android tablets. There is a more limited phone version of Roon as well.
Additionally, there is a small and simple web based ui for configuring your machine’s networking (if needed) and doing operations like factory reset or formatting internal storage.
This has nothing to do with ROCK/NUC, and more with Roon. For music, your music has to be on drives connected to the NUC via USB or they need to be served by a NAS or computer using SMB.
As for your Mu-So and Zeppelin, both are AirPlay devices which Roon supports.
you can backup your Roon database on a USB attached drive or a remote NAS or computer with an SMB share.
ROCK exposes all the drives connected to it as a network SMB share, so you can just copy it there. It does not do ripping.
I’m still not clear about certain things (sorry for being thick). For example, when Roon doesn’t find album art, I download it via Safari then drag/drop it into Roon. How would that be done with a NUC/Rock ? Would I still need another machine to do this, then move it into the NUC?
Currently, all my music resides on drives connected to the Mac Mini. How would I eventually move them to a NUC/Rock ? The file format is Extended Mac OS - I presume I won’t be able to unplug/plug, plus there is the music on the internal drive.
Going from your comment to question 4, I guess I would have to add the NUC to the network and copy everything there? That would also mean, I would have keep the mini (or other) to do all the ripping/downloading/admin stuff and use the NUC just to run Roon and feed the DAC. Is that correct? If so, on one hand I’d have higher costs (2 machines), more fiddling to do (2-step processes) but I’d be able to run Roon in a much more efficient way. Or am I getting this completely wrong?
Drag dropping art files into Roon can still be done from on any device on your network, as long as Roon is running on that device. Roon would be running as a “remote” for ROCK.
[quote=“Cemil, post:5, topic:26260”]
Currently, all my music resides on drives connected to the Mac Mini. How would I eventually move them to a NUC/Rock ? The file format is Extended Mac OS - I presume I won’t be able to unplug/plug, plus there is the music on the internal drive.
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Your music would be stored either in either network storage, an external USB drive connected to the NUC, or internal storage, meaning a 2nd hard drive inside the NUC. More information is here.
[quote=“Cemil, post:5, topic:26260”]
Going from your comment to question 4, I guess I would have to add the NUC to the network and copy everything there?
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The NUC will need to be on the network regardless. How you get the music into Roon is up to you (and described in detail it the article I linked above).
Either way, I don’t think it will be much more complicated than whatever you’re doing now – you’ll just be saving it to a network folder, as opposed to wherever you’re saving it now
However, since I am sure someone will move it to the right place, I’ll go ahead.