Apple’s biggest macOS release to date, Big Sur, is coming soon! Big Sur will feature a refined new design with streamlined apps, powerful controls, and intuitive customization options.
What does Big Sur mean for Roon subscribers?
We’ve been testing Big Sur with Roon for a while and have been keeping a close watch on feedback from our Community Beta testers. So far, we’re pleased to say everything is fully functional and we haven’t identified any compatibility issues. In the unlikely event that you do experience issues once you’ve updated your Mac, just drop us a message over in #support and we’ll get you back listening to your music in no time.
We’ll continue to test Roon software with Big Sur to make sure everything is working as it should before Apple’s official release in the fall. That way, you can update your operating system with confidence.
It seems like MacOS 11 Big Sur should be released this week. Is Roon 1.7(Build 667) optimized for OS 11 or will it use Rosetta 2 to run Roon? Is there any performance hit difference between OS 10.15? Or any performance gain between the two? Thanks for any insight.
Rosetta 2 is used for running apps built for intel on a Apple Silicon (M1) based Mac. As long as you don’t have one of the new MBA, MBP 13’’ or Mac Minis with an M1 processor, Rosetta 2 will not have to jump in.
Question would be to here from ROON whether they already compile and tested some dual-platform binaries on a Apple Silicon test unit?
I haven’t had much trouble on the Big Sur betas with the Roon app, once or twice I saw it disappear as if I had quit the app, but there was no crash report or anything and relaunching it worked fine. There don’t seem to be any compatibility issues with Rosetta 2.
People seem to be getting confused about this. Rosetta 2 translates software built for Intel CPU Macs to the new M1 CPU chip. The new Macs that use the M1 CPU were just announced. They are the ONLY Macs that use Rosetta 2. All existing OS X Macs use Intel CPUs and do not use the translation provided by Rosetta. So unless you have one of the brand new M1 Macs, Roon is not using Rosetta 2.
You are correct, there is some confusion, thanks for clarifying.
So unless you have one of the brand new M1 Macs
or the developer transition kit, which is already in people’s hands. I’ve heard the Intel binary does work in Rosetta 2 on the DTK, so should be fine on the M1 Macs too.
That is good to know. Hopefully, Roon will provide a “native” version for M1 Macs as the performance will be better than with Rosetta. Rosetta is a stop-gap until developers have a chance to build native versions.
Yes, but he was just making the point that the M1 is fast and that Rosetta works really well. However, binary translations of Intel software running on an M1 Mac will be slower than native M1 software running on an M1 Mac. If you own an M1 Mac, that is really all you care about.
Good to hear that it seems to be OK under Big Sur. However, given Apple’s inability to distinguish alpha testing, beta testing, and general availability across all their OS platforms, I’ll give Big Sur and M1 a big body swerve for the foreseeable future.
