Roon experience with poor internet connection

Hi everyone,

Forgive my ignorance but I am seeking some advise without going through the hassle of doing the 2 week trial. Just trying to find out if its worth bothering with as I have extremely poor broadband <1Mbit/s and I am wondering if that would detract from the experience.

I have a Meridian MC200 and MS600 and the media is stored on my Qnap TS-269L. I use Control PC and Control MAC to do admin stuff on the core like export, import and backup, and the iPad control app to control the playing.

I believe that Roon provides details on the media to increase the music experience but my concern is, does it require a decent internet connection. If it doesn’t get that, will it freeze and be intermittent, or not even work. Please advise

Hi Martin,

with this slow download speed my guess is that grabbing all the metadata will take very long, depending on how big your library is. It may take days to get it done. Once it’s done you should have no issues using Roon with your local library subject your LAN network is fast enough (GBit LAN is recommended). Just give it a try.

However if you plan to stream TIDAL as well this most likely will be a problem.

Hope this helps.

Cheers
NOA

Yep, you’ll be fine using Roon on a local library, but your connection speed is way too low for lossless streaming via Tidal.

Thanks very much for your replies. I do subscribe to Tidal and can only play it on my iPhone as the broadband is so rubbish. Ironic that I work for an ISP that is offering 200Mbit/s to consumers.

My storage is 1500 albums, 20000 odd tracks, so not massive but not insignificant. I suppose I could take my Roon core to someone who has decent broadband for the initial setup.

I was concerned that it might be very chatty and talking to cloud based servers, and would hang frequently waiting for a response. Is that not the case?

No. Following the initial metadata and artwork retrieval it runs updates in the background but I’ve never found it to be bandwidth intensive. On doing the initial setup let it run overnight and whilst you’re at work.

Or take your Roon Server device with all your music to the office (if you are allowed to connect private devices in the office) and do the initial metadata retrieval there.

(if your setup is portable enough)

Thanks Chris, but they are so anal I can barely connect my corporate laptop to the corporate network. I have never known a company like it. Install Control PC on my work laptop I can forget it.

I am staying at my brothers on Monday night and he has a 100Mbit/s internet connection so I will take my NAS and MacBook and do it there. I intend to my Synology NAS the storage and Macbook the core. Is that the way to do it?

Yes. That would work.
You just need to be aware that the IP address of your Synology might differ, when you connect it to a different network. So you probably need to adjust the storage settings (DHCP).

If you use a static IP address on your Synology, you need to make sure it is within the IP address range of the respective network.

Keep in mind that in this setup Roon will only be usable, as long as your MacBook is available. (just saying because it is a portable computer).

Chris
I have my network at home setup to give out reserved addresses but the Synology is free to get IP address from DHCP pool of any network that its attached to.

So can I run my Synology NAS as my core then as I don’t want to always keep my MACbook on