I’m new to Roon, so this may be a very basic question, but I want to make sure I’m setting up everything the right way before ripping my CD collection of 500 CD’s.
The plan is to rip the CD’s using dBpoweramp software on a MacBook Pro (latest OS, 10.15.2) onto an external solid-state 2TB hard drive, then connect the SSD through to Nucleus, which is my core, via the USB port, and have access to both streaming (Qobuz) and ripped sources.
Questions:
Is dBpoweramp the best software for this?
For the highest possible audio quality, is FLAC the preferred format?
Will all of the metadata come through?
Are there any compatibility issues?
Does then SSD have to be pre-formatted to work with the Nucleus?
Any other potential issues?
AFAIK, the Nucleus only supports HFS+ file systems as read-only. Without jumping through a lot of really nasty hoops, the Mac can neither format nor even mount an already-formatted Ext4 file system.
So, if you go the route you are thinking, you won’t be able to subsequently add new music through Roon. You’ll have to reattach the drive to your Mac to write to it.
Alternatively, since Roon exposes your USB-attached drive as a Samba Share, you can attach the drive to your Nucleus, remote-mount it on your Mac, and just save the music files to it over the network. That’s what I would do.
No Apple-supplied software will recognize, let-alone format Ext4. There exist 3rd-party implementations of Ext4 for the Mac. But AFAICT, they all have their bugs/defects.
Either go the SMB route, or the HFS+ route you were originally comtemplating.
Oops! You said exFAT, ntot Ext4. I guess that is read/writable by the Nucleus, so that would be an option …
