Roon Client/Server - Best Practice?

Roon Software Discussion
102

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

cifs is smbv1 and lacks proper monitoring

103

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.

104

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

105

I noticed MS recently made the .Net Core cross-platform, with support for Linux and Mac OS X. Have you tried it to see how performance compares to Mono?

1 Like
106

Thanks for the link @sm31 – we follow this project closely and have been playing with it for a while now. It’s not quite ready to do what we want, but the GC and VM are both faster than Mono. Unfortunately, Mono provides quite a bit more than just the Core so we can’t quite convert over yet.

The hope is that long term, Xamarin will split out more of the Mono class libraries into a piece that can work with DNX.

108

Hello,

Sorry to take so long to get back to this forum.

I mean move the physical storage & core server to another room completely, then connect the client via hardwired ethernet. This has a few advantages, it means you can locate your spinning disks out of the listening room, reducing noise, you remove electrical noise from the core server / storage system, and you can use an actively cooled core server with fans, as the noise is no longer an issue. Then a lower powered, passively cooled system can ber used in the listening room, keeping it silent with no functionality compromise.

It sounds a little complicated, but once you have a NAS and a powerful core PC, then you can deploy as many clients as you want around the house using small, silent systems.

I hope this helps.

Dave

109

Hello Rob,

I’d go with something like a QNAP or Synology two bay NAS, running mirrored Western Digital RED drives (designed for NAS / Arrays), store the music on the NAS, and connect that using powerlines to the MAC in the listening room, and the MAC can then use a smaller, cheaper SSD to hold the Roon database. This gives you speed and ease of use in the listening room, whilst protecting your music via mirrored drives on the NAS.

If you’re really paranoid (I am) I would also have a USB drive, intermittently backup the NAS to that, then disconnect the drive. This gives you an air gapped drive, so if something nasty gets on your network (you already have a level of protection using OS X, a version of Unix) then the USB backup drive is what we call ‘air gapped’ so your data is completely protected.

Don’t bother with the audiophile NAS, that’s just a regular NAS with a quiet power supply, but even a powerline network can supply data fast enough to a client for smooth, hi-res playback. I would, however, urge you not to use wi-fi for streaming, I have consistently found that anything less than 802.11ac will stutter even with commercial access points, the router based access points supplied by most ISP’s would be let nowhere near my audio system, they’re designed down to a price, not up to a performance standard. It’s one of the first things I recommend most SMB’s change, ditch the cheapo ISP router and put a quality routing solution in place with a quality Wi-Fi access point, makes a huge difference to system performance.

If you’re going to use powerlines, go with the 500 mbps units like the TP-Link AV500 models, they’re not as good as a CAt 5e / CAT 6 gigabit ethernet network, but they are a good, economic solution when running ethernet cables is not possible.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Dave

110

Thanks David, very useful stuff. Building my shopping list now (-:. Being very paranoid, I have a raid array I can use for the ‘air-gapped’ backup. Much appreciate the detailed info - Cheers Robert