Roon Core SonicTransporter i9 2nd Gen, Is there life after > 200k tracks?

Hi, I currently have ca. 100,000 tracks on my SonicTransporter i9 2nd Gen. I see on the specs that it supposedly supports a maximum of 200,000 tracks. What happens after that limit? Can the ST i9 support more than that? Do I need to think about another hardware for the core? I also understand that if you flag (star, rate, etc.) Tidal tracks, they become part of your “library”.

Not sure when I will exceed that “limit” but I wonder, if that is the case, what are the options.

Thanks.

Tidal has a 10k limit.

That is a question better directed to SGC. But, if I had to guess, I would say things would begin to act slower; slower searches, etc.

I see similar questions in this forum regarding Roon OS devices as well. Also read somewhere that after so many tracks it is better to use Windows or Roon OS cores? Is that so?

People have several times more tracks on lesser hardware, see the suggestions further down on this thread, and other threads linked from there.

I wasn’t aware of that. Does this mean a Roon library cannot contain more than 10000 Tidal tracks?

Roon itself can have many more tracks. As for Tidal you should investigate, it is 10k albums, but not sure how that relates to track limit.

I dropped Tidal years ago. Just wanted to let you know there was a hard limit.

@Arlen I was surprised by this low limit and googled. Best I found is this on Reddit:

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Thanks for investigating. I assume these 10000 albums may contain a lot more tracks. Let’s hope they only have this track limit for tracks that are individually added to a library.

As far as I read, it seems to be either/or, whichever limit you hit first, but most likely it will be the track limit, and it’s the sum of albums tracks that counts. Else, probably best to ask Tidal support.

I’m surprised that this does not come up more often for Roon users who have only Tidal

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Wow, that’s pretty low. I don’t use Tidal as much as my library, and certainly I don’t tag Tidal items. Still, it would be good if @agillis would clarify that 200k “track limit” on the specification chart regarding the ST i9.

I am always trying to manage customer expectations. The sonicTransporter i9 is the fastest commercially available Roon server so typically everything in Roon is near instant when you have one as your Roon Core.

The biggest problem with Roon and extremely large libraries is performance. Once you go over 200K tracks things like searches start to slow down. I have a customer with 1.2 million tracks and searches can take 10 to 20 seconds. This would be completely unacceptable to many users but this customer recognizes the limitation.

Also with very large libraries you need to start optimizing other parts of your setup. For example you need a good network and either store all your music on the internal SSD or use a very high performance NAS if you use a spinning Roon performance would be almost unusable.

If anybody is interested in discussing using Roon with extremal large libraries you can contact me using the smallgreencomputer.com “contact us” button.

@Gustavo_Gabaldon 200K is not low at all! Roon specs out 100K tracks max for their top of the line Nucleus+

Very well! I will cross that bridge when it’s due. I suppose that libraries with more than 100k tracks are not the “bread and butter” of Roon installations but would imagine that Roon will have to address that eventually and/or also the hardware will evolve to satisfy those needs (faster interfaces, networks, SSD’s, processors, etc.).

Yes this is a very small part of the Roon customer base. All my customers with massive libraries have the sonicTransporter i9 and don’t have issues.

Is the sonicTransporter i9 running ROCK or Windows with Roon server?

The sonicTransporter runs Sonicorbiter OS our version of Linux that is highly optimized to run Roon Core and also other audio server products like HQplayer.

On my iMac 2019 8-core, 128GB RAM, internal 2TB + 8TB, a big Thunderbolt Raid, I manage over 800.000 tracks. Since Roon 2.0 no more problem.

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