Roon Client/Server - Best Practice?

oh @drsah – you can’t post a photo like that without giving us specs and links :smile:

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Tranquil PC Abel B2 chassis would be my guess…

Yes, Tranquil PC chassis, i5 nuc ( previous generation), 8gb ram, winn7 and small SSD disc 64gb. Can post few pictures later, how it lookis inside.

few more pictures of my NUC:






Nice! If you want to show off more here, don’t hold back :slight_smile:

I moved 2 posts to a new topic: Beagle Bone Black

Okay please help, I am totally confused and new to Roon, love the GUI etc.

Need help for the best way to setup Roon on my system.

System is a high end music server running Win 8.1 optimised, special Intel server SSD’s OS running on a seperate SSD Drive to the music drives. I have this connected direct to the DAC via USB, all files are stored locally on the music server not on a NAS

I have then setup Roon on my Mac Pro using it as the Remote. I don’t want to store files on the Mac Pro and then transfer over ethernet as I feel the music files are better located directly on the Music Server.

Have I got this setup right?

Simon, that setup sounds good to me. I do basically the same thing–windows server with music on local drives, mac (and other) remotes.

Thanks, I have ended up totally removing JRiver and JPLay, the best quality by far was Roon as a server on the dedicated Music Server which is headless, running direct tot he DAC’s ASIO driver, it is a high end DAC any differences are quite noticeable. This also allows me to run Native DSD, only top to DSD 128 though, the DAC does up to & including DSD 512. Thats not much of an issue though as there almost no material at DSD256 and beyond yet. I was surprised that getting rid of JPlay made the sound so much better. It also allows me to play back any file format natively whereas JPLay limited you to just Flac & Wav files. ITs made a massive difference to how I use the system. Loving Roon. I am a software developer so had to write a custom batch file that terminates the remote desktop session and starts Roon for Roon to work.

I am the distributor for Computer Audio DEsign’s and I have urging them to get Roon running for some time. Now it is with great success it will make customers lives so much easier and using the music server a pleasure. Before ahdn it the transition with the limitations imposed by JPLay and JRiver were difficult.

Hoping in the future Roon will have an option to just use it as a server which will mean I don’t have to have the Intel Graphics drivers installed or .Net framework as my remote computer can do all the heavy GUI tasks.

It is one of best prices of software I have had the pleasure of working with, it works seamlessly with Tidal and IMHO is better than Tidal’s own app.I hope that one day Qobuz is integrated as well, even better if I had the option to purchase music from the Qobuz store directly into the music server/database.

Thanks and if you are looking for any testers than understand software please let me know. Looking forward to your next response and developing the music server usability further.

This is in alpha testing now, and will be coming soon. .NET will still be required, but the graphics requirements and burden will be gone. .NET shouldn’t scare you though, it should not impact anything on a Windows system. On Mac OSX, we ship a slightly trimmed Mono build to provide the .NET framework for that platform.

Can you clarify what you mean by “out of the listening room”? Do you mean this literally, or just that there be some physical distance between the core and the DAC?

I ask because I have a large room for listening, with the computer on one end, and the DAC on the other, about 15-20 feet away.

I think @ukaudiophile means both. Best to be electrically isolated, as well as physically isolated to avoid over-the-air electromagnetic interference.

There is also the issue of noise from fans and spinning hard drives that pollutes the listening environment.

The PC is pretty much silent (I built it myself to be so, so selected case, fans, PSU, HDD, etc. be quiet), so that kind of noise is not an issue.

But you’re saying EM interference could still be an issue, even 15-20 feet away?

15-20 is far enough unless you have something very powerful over there. But in the end, even 8 inches can be far enough.

Do you hear noise? if not, you are OK :wink:

HELP PLEASE?

I am upgrading a 2012 Mac Mini with 16GB memory and a 512GB SSD to act as Roon Central and shortly to be controlled by the Roon iPad App.

Would the experienced users out there

  1. Go for a 1TB SSD and keep music on the Mini
  2. Buy a NAS drive to hold the music on the network
  3. Buy a Raid Array connected to the Mini by USB 3.0
  4. Buy an audiophile NAS Like Melco and connect that by USB

My network has to be wireless or Powerline

Opinions and suggestions much appreciated

Cheers Robert

Hi @robfol,

I would do 1 or 2 depending on how much music you are storing and how paranoid you are about redundancy. I would not suggest 3 or 4. If your music fits on a 1 tb (or 2 tb as there are 2 tb ssd’s available) then you could go with #1.

Benefits include not having another piece of hardware and less taxation on your network. By this I mean, Roon Works as such. remote sends instruction to play Fleetwood Mac Rumors to Core, Core goes out and pulls the music from the music source (in this case internal hard drive, however, if the music was on a NAS the Core would pull the music from the NAS to the Core machine to process), the core processes the music and sends it to the endpoint. Given that you are on shakier (wireless or Powerline) networking infrastructure than standard Cat 5e wired, you would eliminate a lot of network traffic by having the music local to the core. And by local I mean SATA speeds. USB 3.0 doesn’t cut it.

The only downside is that there is no redundancy if the single drive fails. You need to make sure you are diligent about backups.

If you had a wired network and/or cared more about redundancy then I’d go with #2., plop a NAS setup with RAID 5, 6, or 10 mode and connect it via gigabyte. Hope that helps.

I’ve got a Mac (MacBook Air) running the core and FreeNAS storing the media, access over CIFS. What’s annoying is that adding more music to the NAS share is not picked up by Roon.

This is why I’m currently thinking local disk for media storage (especially if I get a Mac Mini; I’m also thinking about NUC w/ some version of Windows, but still probably local disk space).

The NAS is still very good for backing up the media and Roon data from the local SSD, though.

you using cifs:// or smb:// on mac?

cifs is smbv1 and lacks proper monitoring

Somehow I had become convinced here on the forums that I should use cifs:// …

I’ve switched to smb:// and now I’m guessing symlinks work differently than before. Or somehow it is finding all my music multiple times. The “natural” explanation is that it is following some symlinks that it wasn’t following before.

I have the following structure:

  • /media/audio has subdirectories per type (e.g. amazon, flac, hifi, itunes, mixes, mp3)
  • /media/audio/servers has subdirectories per server (e.g. daap, roon, sq)

The per-server directories have symlinks to “…/…/flac” and other types selectively. However, when I point Roon at /Volumes/media/audio/servers/roon, it finds nothing. Yet in Finder I can see the media files just fine (and the symlinks show up as directories). This was the case for both cifs:// and smb:// mounts.

So I ended up pointing Roon at /Volumes/media/audio instead. Since it handles duplicates well, it didn’t really matter. With cifs:// it found ~28k tracks. With smb:// it found ~56k tracks at first. Now that I restarted Roon, it is at ~114k tracks and counting.

I will rethink the directory structure so that the symlinks aren’t below the actual media anymore, which will hopefully stop the count from increasing by itself. :smile:

I haven’t yet gotten around to actually adding music there while Roon is running. Probably best tested after the restructure.

P.S. Yes, it is the symlinks and I’m accumulating duplicates of albums.

Thanks for Mac Mini suggestions, planning to do (-: