Roon Core on a Pi4?

A Windows running NUC would do the trick.

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Over the weekend, I tried to bring Plex up on a Pi 3. It trapped on an illegal instruction because the ARM architecture varies significantly from one major version to the next. The package provider did not build for different ARM architectures or segregate releases by ARM architecture. My hardware was missing one that was needed.

In Intel land, the Linux installer figures out which hardware is on the box and selects the proper video codec libraries optimized to the floating point and video hardware support available on the box. This is largely transparent but appears in the software defined radio package GQRX where the numerical library optimization is an explicit step in the user level installation. A Linux command analyzes the hardware and sets up symbolic links to the proper libraries for GQRX on that hardware.

This will be a big issue for DSP implementation which uses the vector floating point instructions or uses video display vector floating point function libraries provided by nVidia or ATI/AMD. ARM has builds of software defined radio GQRX that sort of run. This package makes heavy use of the FFT to compute spectrograms for the user interface displays and do convolution and digital filtering for signal selection and detection. This ARM3 architecture runs this package grudgingly.

ARM has the horses to play back a small number of FLAC streams (a design goal). Heavy floating point computation was not an original design goal but sufficient FP to support smartphone audio and video codecs is present in current architectures. ARM works nicely as a ROON endpoint because all the heavy DSP happens in the core.

ROONā€™s public statements about Core host selection mention library size rather than number of simultaneous streams supported (the real selection basis).

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yes, thatā€™s my question tooā€¦

yes, i agree.
i have now roon running 24h on my (i5) PC. and i have (i think) a big library. the PC is the same i use for work. no problems with roon. so, my impression is that my system (and official requirementsā€¦) are oversized. i donā€™t use DSD, though.
i can understand that on official roon side the requirements stand firm, so no one can conplain.
but on the other hand ā€¦ one can try with lower specs. it seems that people has installed roon core on some NAS and are happy with the experience.
it looks to me sensible looking for a less demanding hardware.
and it looks to me unreasonable to buy a NUC (or equivalent) which is nothing less than ā€¦ another full PC (even though fanless) to run aside my main work PC.

I agree. Looking at other usersā€™ system you might think this is a CGI rendering farm.

I have Roon Core running a 10 years old Core 2 Duo just fine. I donā€™t use any DSP and I donā€™t have DSD files and usually just one or two streams.

The only thing I would agree is mandatory is an SSD for the huge database file structure of Roon. It makes the difference between a responsive browsing experience and a sluggish system.

As long as your CPU can keep up with the processing youā€™re fine.

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To get an idea of what Roon recommends in this regard, see the specs and capabilities listed for the Roon Nucleus devices.

Well, now there is beta 64 bit Raspbian as well as a 8 GB RAM RPi, can we have Roon Core please?

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Still the same under-powered, for running Core, CPU.

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Iā€™m not sure Iā€™m really grasping this. Why would a person want to run software that costs $120/yr on a $100 computer?
Is it just the challenge of it all, a pet trick?

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Thank goodness for mute this thread.

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Iā€™m sure Roon would be delighted if they could get Core to run on a $100 computer.

Without holding back future feature plans. I think this is a big reason for a minimum spec.

Iā€™d happily run the software even if the computer was freeā€¦

Since Apple will swap from intel to Arm, Iā€™m sure Roon will compile core for Arm soon !

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If by that you mean that will result in the ability to run on a Pi, donā€™t hold your breath.

Doubt that there is enough horsepower on a Pi to run Core.

So what power do you think is needed ?
It seems that one day, a Pi (5, 6 ?) will be enough.

maybe already a big 4ā€¦

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It needs to beat an Intel i3 as thatā€™s Roons recommended minimum also nativley support ssd for OS not an sdcard.

Next Pi, perhapsā€¦

Dear Roon, give us a version for a RPi 4 and give us (for those are ok to test, let say test users) a chance to test it on a 4GB or 8GB :slight_smile:

wonā€™t happen

roon is not about to release a roon server package that is not going to performā€¦until RPi comes out with something that competes at i3 specs that they will stand behind its just not going to happen.

we have enough issues with NAS systems that are not really up to spec IMHO

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