mmm I couldn’t be happy nor sad 
It boils down to the understanding of the Roon ecosystem.
Streaming audio is not trivial.
By willing degrading specifications in the ecosystem, something is going to fail.
The network needs to be stable and the Roon Core needs to have the compute power to handle (all) the streams.
We are on a quest to best SQ but we are fckng everything up in the process by willingly “improving” our systems beyond repair, WHY?
We spend thousands of dollars, kronor, pounds on equipment but want a Roon Core on a Pi that costs 50 dollars… go figure…
Why not use a streaming service locally on a device, when on the go?
Whilst having a stable, high quality streaming (Roon) ecosystem at homebase.
There will be bugs in Roon that occur, also in a stable ecosystem, but they can be fixed by the people at Roon.
Lets have the people at Roon build and expand the feature sets we want to have in our Roon environment and leave edge cases as is.
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I do know we’ll not get Roon on it, but it is not because it is not capable to run it.
Most of us do not run multiple streams, just one, until I can clone myself. RPI 4 8Gb does cost a bit more then 50$ and it is plenty powerful to run pretty much any other server, especially in dedicated configuration.
I happen to run my Roon server on over 10 year old computer that is way-way under spec and have no stuttering or other problems that other throw thousands at. It is all within the domain of skill and not power, more money, of more other Audiophoolery.
Hi-fi audio industry keeps coming with $$$ solution that I could always managed to make with about $100. Yes it is not for everyone and that’s the reason Roon core will not run on RPI.
Build a NUC. That’s cheap enough.
This! Exactly!
It will happen, but not soon, and not for the RPi4. See these notes from Danny:
MacOS and Roon are not being ported to ARM.
Apple themselves say it is being ported to Apple Silicon, which is based on the ARM Instruction Set Architecture, ISA (Apple was a cofounder of ARM and has a license) but also includes a lot of proprietary extensions.
Modern computers increasingly use specialized processors.
Letting a general purpose CPU do all the work with software is not optimal in terms of the delicate performance/energy balance. Energy consumption is not just about battery life, it matters for all devices because they overheat and melt.
It is not a coincidence that Nvidia, which makes the GPUs that are used for machine learning/AI as well as graphics, is acquiring ARM. Nvidia also adopted the ARM ISA a while back. (Nvidia’s top GPU has 10,496 cores!)
i don’t fully understand the love of the rPi. sure it’s a bit cheaper than other boards like a NUC, but it’s a pretty compromised board from a general computer standpoint. There’s no real time clock, limited IO, a horrible mechanical form factor (ports all over the place that makes it look like a sputnik when cables are plugged in). I have used them for a few applications, and it’s an amazing machine for the dollar spent.
It’s not like the Pi is $50 and all other computers are tens of thousands. For another $100-$200 you get a machine that is massively more capable.
I can see it as a tinkering embedded system for something totally non-critical, but asking to run the Core app on it is crazy talk. Buy a real computer to run real applications that you want to be reliable.
Sheldon
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I hope that falls through, it will mean the end of ARM.
One reason I like it is because as a platform it is not being monitored and monetised by the usual suspects.
That said I wouldn’t be putting Roon server on it even if I could!
I like the efficiency of raspi. I don’t need a more powerful machine for my use case so it feels a bit more economical to use a raspi. As you said, “it’s an amazing machine for the dollar”.
There is quite a bit of native code as well.
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Why do people make statements like this? What is wrong with legitimate businesses developing, producing, and selling quality products for an acceptable profit margin?
As lets face it - if they didnt, they wouldnt be paying us lot to feed our hifi habits…
I doubt that dropping $40 billion on ARM will be a product killer…you are not going to spend this much and not reap the rewards that it comes with. Makes no sense it would be the end of…more like a boost to it at the very least.
Nothing is wrong with that. Spying on me and controlling my computer in ways that I have little or no control over isn’t something I’m thrilled about though. It is nice to have a platform that I can set up exactly as I want and which is not under the control of a third-party.
It will be a company killer. ARM is successful now because it is not in competition with its customers, it doesn’t make chips of its own. That engenders trust between the licensor and licensee and is a huge reason why so many firms use ARM chips in their products.
Under Nvidia’s control all that changes, sooner or later. They will be licensing chip designs and selling competing devices, this will erode the trust that has been built up. Eventually ARM will lose customers through this, or Nvidia will simply stop licensing the designs for ARM chips when it is making enough money from the chips it is manufacturing itself.
Either way ARM goes away.
An RPi form factor x86, which is what I suspect some in this thread are really asking for.
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And with an Intel Atom x5-z8350, it still hasn’t got enough oomph to run a Roon Core with a decent-sized library…
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I think it should be okay (but not great), assuming the eMMC storage can keep up. I’m experimentally running Roon Core on a 10 year-old netbook (O/S is Arch Linux) with an Intel Atom® Processor N450. Library size is over 20,000 tracks. This netbook’s CPU is not as powerful as the four year-old Intel Atom® x5-Z8350 in the Rock Pi X, yet it’s a reasonably responsive Core and can even handle a modest amount of DSP:
Note: I have upgraded storage in the netbook to an SSD and RAM to 2 GB
I’m not suggesting that everyone rush out and replace their Intel NUCs with the Rock Pi X Model B. However, even though the Rock Pi X Model B is rather under-spec’ed relative to Roon’s minimum Core recommendations, I suspect it will work fine for those with at most two or three zones and modest library size.