Roon and file formats on a Mac

I’m considering moving from PC to a Mac.
I have my music as flac and wav files on different hard drives formatted to NTFS for PC.

Do I need to reformat the hard drives to an Apple format so they can be played in Roon?

Thanks for any replies.

I would get an external drive and format it to exFAT. That would be the most compatible between the different OS.

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Mac has NTFS read only support, but honestly I wouldn’t rely on that either. Best thing, as suggested, is move your files to an exFAT formatted drive, which is fully supported by Windows, Mac, Rock, Linux.

In my case, the exFAT file system under macOS proved to be unstable and led to data loss more than once. Just search youself and compare the file system formats.

Anyways, sooner or later you’ll need fast read/write access to drives, so I recommend to get some good NTFS drivers, e.g. from Paragon or Tuxera.
And if I’m not mistaken, one could still mount with write access an NTFS drive under macOS via the terminal.

Personally I would buy an extra drive, format it in a Mac native format and copy across.

It allows you to keep your current drives as safely backups.

NTFS (which isn’t ideal on Mac) and the current Mac formats are more robust than the older FAT based formats.

You need to pay for read write support for NTFS on a Mac but it’s not hugely expensive. Not had any isssus with exfat mind moving data between pc Mac or Linux we use them all the time at work and they are reused a lot.

Have to agree with an NTFS driver on a Mac for read/write capabilities. I use Paragon and it’s been stable for years on my Mac and has more than paid for itself with its usefulness.

I have also paid for Paragon NTFS software a few times over the years and agree it has been very good.

But I have had no issues with ExFat drives over the last couple of years at all, and they have become my default cross platform choice

I’m just about to deploy a new 5TB external HD for my music and wondered if I should use APFS? My back up drive is Mac OS extended and it works fine. I have no need to be able to read on a different OS.
Many thanks for the advise.

If you don’t need to read it on another OS apfs is fine.

And if you’re backing it up using Time Machine - I think apfs has some performance advantages.

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