First question is your C drive an SSD or a HDD , if it’s not an SSD you will struggle anyway.
Try splitting your collection down into sub folders so that you load less at one go, 20 000 is a lot to do at one go. Also bear in mind once imported Roon will do a lot of work in the background organizing metadata etc so your PC will churn away. I would do maybe a 1000 at a time
An i5 may just cut it but 8gb for that size library is probably borderline JRiver has a much smaller memory requirement than Roon . My 6000 album library takes up around 3gb my PC is i7, 7700 3.3 ghz RAM 16gb On Windows 10. There are hardware guides in the Knowledge Base
There are users with big libraries like this but I suspect they are rare, strictly Roon has no library size limit but as you are seeing loading is somewhat time and PC resource consuming
Roon unfortunately doesn’t support CUE/FLAC files , you can use JRiver to split them into individual files , works fine BUT 20,000 albums WOW …it will take a while , about 2 mins/CD
If any of your list are deal breakers Roon is not for you. Folder Navigation will never happen , as per Roon COO. The split cue stuff, SACD ISO have been requests for ever with no sign
Roon mobile is said to be “coming soon” but has been for years
I run a dual system JRiver/Roon for much of the above and Box Set management
In JRiver there is a built in expression language and a Rules engine, so you can create a view of say albums and apply a rule
In my case my classical files are in a folder F:\music library\02 - Classical , so I can set a rule
[filename (path)] Contains ‘02 - Classical’
and I see just classical. You can extend the rules additively almost indefinitely where there is tag (even user defined tags) eg you can even define a sub set of Composers say your top 10 and set
[composer] in ‘Bach’, ‘Beethoven’ etc
It’s all visual wizards, it’s one of JRivers biggest features. All the views you define are visible in JRemote the mobile app
Okay, I also use JRiver and know about those features (albeit I use them clumsily). I didn’t know if this was a specific term JRiver used that had another equivalence.
I suppose you could do something similar in Roon too, it just would be cludgier to switch on/off the storage drives.
Hi @juan_pina1
I bookmarked this explanation from Roon’s CTO regarding hardware. He explains why Roon makes demands on hardware that other programs do not.
If Roon isn’t suitable for you, that’s fine. Only you can judge. But I think it can help to understand why Roon behaves the way it does.