The Dolly Parton issue was down to Roon. Since I don’t have any DP release in my library, but do have one track which she composed, Roon decided that she was a Composer but not an artist, despite there being hundreds in Qobuz. This is wrong. An elementary mistake. There should be a solution. There isn’t.
I don’t have any CDs in my library which Mozart performs on, yet Roon tells me Mozart is a performer based on a CD called something like “100 Classical Tunes to paint the ceiling by” in Qobuz. It should be possible to correct this, without depending on correcting all the metadata on Qobuz, but it is not.
Roon “knows” that the Bach Matthew Passion is of the order of two hours long, there is even a field in its composition schema called Nominal Length, but nonetheless gives me tiny excerpts from that work as instances of the whole thing, making the results of a search effectively useless. Wanting a solution to this is not wanting unrealistic “perfection” as you imply, it is just wanting the barest amount of competence.
These are all failings of Roon, most probably of its database design and implementation. There are many others. Until Roon sorts its own act out, it is no position to credibly criticise Microsoft and Apple, and I certainly couldn’t justify buying an expensive machine to dedicate to such nonsense. I hope things change with 1.8
Spotlight is one of many culprits. You can’t kill everything…unlike RoonOS where Roon started with just the bare minimum and added only what was needed.
I would suggest the most likely reason this isn’t happening is support. One significant advantage to Roon Labs of ROCK running on a limited amount of hardware is that it lightens the support load.
I don’t know where you’re at, but I bought a NUC8i7, Adata 512 and 16 gigs of ram for under $400 over the holidays. All new. That’s 4/7th of what an M1 mini would cost, and less than half if the ram were factored in (those two sticks were 60 bucks or so, and like 5 bucks, not 200, for an extra 8, not that it’s of any use in this case).
As long as it fits in 640k of RAM…
And so what ? Roonlabs isn’t going to start selling M1 Nucleii.
What’s your point, exactly, that the M1 is an awesome processor ? It is. That for the first time in God knows how long, Apple isn’t selling something that’s underpowered at the price they’re asking for it ? This coming from a Mac user, yeap, it’s a been a while, let’s hope they continue.
Mine is that an optimised OS for it from Roon will probably happen around the same time as folder browsing.
And it’ll be even more of a no-brainer once there’s an ARM binary. I’d still rather not run Roon on a mini.
You might be shocked to learn that not everything in life is a dick-swinging contest, and than quality of life is sometimes more important : there are edge cases where Roon runs better on Windows than it does on ROCK (or at least used to, it has to do with Mono). Would I personally rather run a dedicated appliance, not out of some fringe religious belief about sound quality, but in terms of convenience ? You betcha. If you’re fine with remoting into your OSX install once in a while to keep it happy, because that allows you to do things you couldn’t otherwise, then it’s a fine choice for you, but it isn’t for everyone, nor is it for most people. No matter how great the M1 is.
It’s not any different than “remoting into” my sonicTransporter i9 using the web interface. My sonicTransporter i9 is better than the top of line Nucleus as it offer better performance and much more flexibility…horsepower matters to me because I am running HQPlayer Embedded. I can’t even do that with RoonOS.
Ah, so that’s what this was about… it’s better for you, absolutely. There are other people and use cases in the universe.
I haven’t played with HQPlayer in a while, but aren’t we still at the point where your use case ($1500 for a two-box solution) is better served by an nVidia GPU ?
What’s with the strawman argument? No one said it can’t and the statement that says it can’t is false. In fact, the opposite has been reported just a few posts above:
I got a 2008 4 gig imac that runs flawlessly what’s the issue here I’m missing. FYI I’m pretty dumb with computers and hate them. I’ll be due for a upgrade soon so where should I look, Roon Nuc or M1 mini? I stream wirelessly from another room to a stock router
When I asked several months ago, I was advised to turn off Automatic updates in the App Store as well as the Time Machine backup process. I would also add that you should set your Login to automatic so it doesn’t ask for a passcode before commencing Roon playback. My M1 works great with no problems but there’s likely other things you can do to optimize it more.
I’d advise against turning off automatic updates. Sure there’s a tiny chance something might break, but I’d rather my software stop working rather than being a platform for the latest bot net.
In short, updates save lives.
Ps. Unless your using a 5 year old mini there is very little need to optimize it, the hardware is more than capable.
For all the flak OS X gets for being a beast (it is) it is still BSD under the hood and very performant.