Like so many others on this forum I would so very much like to be able to utilize Roon at more than one location. At the moment my I have my core on NUC with ROCK at home. I listen to music via this setup at home about 10 hours a week. I have a second music system at my office and I am fortunate enough to have music player here around 40 hours per week. At the office I stream music via my Tidal subscription. I would dearly love to be able to use Roon at work.
Is it feasible to take my NUC/ROCK/CORE backwards and forwards between work and home every day?
Do I just plus the NUC into my PC at work and fire up Roon on the PC?
Is the NUC robust enough to handle the daily journey?
I don’t see a reason why you can’t take the NUC into your Office each day. If local files are on an SSD in the NUC then it would be reasonably sturdy. Carting around an HDD could be more problematic.
You would need to plug the NUC into your network at the Office with an Ethernet cable, then point Roon on your Office PC at the NUC Core.
Edit: If your Office network has a firewall then you will want to allow roon.exe and raatserver.exe to communicate through the firewall.
Hello @Ian_Webster – I can’t speak to whether you could connect the NUC via USB to the PC – I suspect that won’t work, but will leave it to more knowledgeable people such as @andybob to answer that.
But I actually did try plugging a NUC into my office ethernet a few days ago, and I wasn’t able to identify any IP address being assigned to the NUC. (In contrast, when I plugged a Mac laptop into the office ethernet, I was able to identify what IP address it had been assigned, by using an IP mapping tool). I assume this is something to do with my organization’s network being locked down so as not to assign IP addresses to certain classes of device, for security reasons (printers don’t get IP addresses, for example).
And based on my experience with Roon remotes + NUC cores, one needs a way to determine the NUC’s IP address in some way – the Roon remote doesn’t necessarily find the Core without entering an IP address.
So the gist of it is that if you plug your NUC into the office thernet, (a) it might not get assigned an IP address, depending on how tightly locked down your institution’s network is, and (b) you might need an independent way to determine what that IP address is.
Didn’t mean to discourage you – if the NUC getting assigned an IP address if not a problem at your office, it’s not difficult to figure out what the IP address is and make sure your PC connects to that…
Run a second instance of Roon on my work laptop, with my local library duplicated on it. The only (minor) hassle is transfer of the Roon license \when switching between home/office. The only downsides are, settings, playlists etc. are not shared between the two environments.
For that, you would need to do a backup and restore everytime you made a change on one core or the other. Then, you would have to adjust to the proper watched folder, and end-points, etc.
I’ve also been using the method that @hacker19 described. Additions to the library from a streaming service (Qobuz/Tidal) actually get synced across cores, although other things such as tags/playlists/bookmarks do not, as @Jim_F pointed out. And local music would of course have to be copied manually between cores. The approach I’ve taken so far is to treat my home core as the “primary” and not worry about my work core getting out of sync… But I’ve only been doing this for two months or so, and perhaps the divergence between cores will bother me more down the road, especially as I add more local music…
Right, that has been my plan. So I think this could be a viable strategy for @Ian_Webster if he is willing to duplicate a local library one time initially and then perhaps periodically. But also it seems like the portable NUC may be viable.
I’m skeptical about moving a core every day, even ignoring the possibility that one of the locations may not allow the kind of network connectivity that Roon requires. Before COVID-19, my work office streamer was a stand-alone Pi+PiTouch+Pi2AES running moOde with music on a USB SSD that I kept in sync weekly with my home music files. I missed Roon at the office, but I have a sufficiently large local music collection that this arrangement was acceptable.
Now, I’m spending time at two different locations where I control the network fully, so I’ve put together a Zbox CI662 nano with a 4TB SATA SSD running Ubuntu Server and RoonServer. I set it up at my based location, and I have been using it at the second location for over one week with no issues. The only slightly tricky issue is Roon database backups, which I solved by adding a user to my Macbook Pro and opening CIFS file sharing, and letting the Roon core back itself up to the Macbook, which I also travel with. The Macbook in turn backs itself up to the NAS at my base location, and the NAS to Google Cloud.
Hi @Fernando_Pereira – I think I didn’t understand this fully, sorry. Does this mean that you move the Zbox between locations? Or do you access it remotely at your second location? (And if the latter, would you be willing to explain how, at least briefly…?) – thanks.
Thank you all for your responses - but this is getting too complicated for me. I was hoping for a more 'plug and play solution. I guess I’ll just live with TIDAL at work and keep my fingers crossed that at some point ROON introduces some sort of Roon Mobile solution.
Move Zbox between locations. I stay at each for at 1 week or more, and there’s good internet at both. There are some recipes on this site on VPN setups for remote access. I’ve never tried that as I don’t have the time (or confidence) to be my own security engineer.
