I have run Roon on a headless MacMini before. Are you saying there is now a headless program called RoonServer that is controlled by the Roon App on an iPad or other computer much like ROCK on an NUC with RoonOS?
I use Chronosync to sync my music from my Mac (which is the master and where I do metadata editing as needed) to both my Nucleus+ And my NAS. Works great.
Yes. (scroll down the page to RoonServer for macOS)
I suppose you could put Roon on a MacMini and run it as a core, headless.
But you would only need RoonServer for the MacOS.
Interesting. I went straight from running Roon as a core to using ROCK several years ago. Never used RoonServer. Right now I have Roon running on a Windows machine as my core. I wonder if RoonServer would use the Roon info on that machine, or if a library migration would have to be done again. Do you know?
I’m not sure.
But I don’t think it really matters. If it is your core, it is already running RoonServer. Look on the task manager. It is running two or three processes under Roon. RoonServer is one of them. The part that runs the GUI isn’t doing the heavy lifting.
But I understand wanting to strip it down. I just don’t know how to do the install of RoonServer alone on top of an existing install.
RoonServer was released a long time ago… in version 1.1!
No library migration is needed. If you don’t run the UI on your Windows machine, then RoonServer will use fewer resources on the same hardware.
No action is required on Windows? I vaguely remember renaming ~/Library/Roon to ~/Library/RoonServer on my Mac mini to migrate the DB from Roon to RoonServer.
If you dont do a backup and restore then yes this is a faster route assuming you are a bit more OS hands on.I have always run Roon Server on my W10 setup as its headless…but I do now and then run up the GUI interface to update the software when needed.
After reading some reviews for the new M1 Mac, I start to think it is a great choice for hosting Roon Core and some other servers (at the same time!). For only $699, you can get a powerful and very quite (although not fanless) machine with beautiful aluminum case. And I bet its fan will not ramp up often unless it has some very intensive load.
It basically offers the most of the things those “purpose-built” systems promised with much less cost.
1 Like
Im going to get one, maybe 512GB SSD but only 8GB Ram as otherwise the way time is till xmas where 8GB I can get at the Apple shop today or delivery tmro. I might even migrate my MBP 15" i9 over to use it too.
1 Like
Rsync should be available via Mac command line. I use rsync on a NAS to pull files off my ROCK once a day and back them up.
ROCK runs in a Linux base and technically so does max OS (well, BSD, but they’re related and technically similar) so backup unlikely to be an issue.
It is, I use it to sync my library and backups.
1 Like
Is Roon going to produce an M1 native version of Roon?
2 Likes
I just picked up a 512gb / 8gb m1 mini so will be playing with comparison to my nucleus, Both will use a shared folder on a windows machine.
2 Likes
This could be interesting to see. Other than situations where people try really under-spec machines (Celeron in NAS, come to mind), there really isn’t much comparative information of the nature:
Machine X chokes when it gets to this point, but Machine Y handles it fine.
Your library is large enough there could be some differentiation.
‘Both work’ is boring, but helpful I suppose.
The Nucleus is is upgraded to 12gb ram, from its original 4gb. And officially is a tad under spec for my 270k library, but I’m going to try it. I sometimes run my core on my laptop when I used to travel more which is an i9 mbp 15” 2018 with 32gb ram
The actual m1 mini is slated to replace the mbp if it can cope.
1 Like
Would be interested in the outcome, hope you find time to report back.
You will never hear the fan - especially if you are only running Roon Server. Watch the loads on Activity Monitor - never even hit 15% CPU or memory usage.
Yep, me too, but I’m waiting till the new year and will go for a 1TB SSD and 16GB Ram. It’s about time I retired my mid 2012 Macbook Pro.
1 Like
I happen to have both a Nucleus+ and a Macbook Pro M1 laptop (w/16g memory) and 2 licenses of Roon so I ran a quick a/b performance comparison test. This is by no means exhaustive as I didn’t have much time. I will also note that the Nucleus has an internal SSD where the music was stored and the MB Pro had an external disk with the music and was running wifi – so not really quite apples to apples, but the results were interesting. In my main listening area where I have a convolution filter doing room correction, the M1 ran faster – the Roon processing speed was about 65x on the M1 vs about 45x on the Nucleus+. In another zone in my house where I have upscaling to 192khz activated, the Roon processing speed was about 30x on the M1 vs about 55x on the Nucleus+. Unclear to me why the results change so much between the two tests and hard to draw a conclusion on what is faster from them. But it’s likely the M1 gets faster if Roon goes native vs emulation and even in emulation, the M1 looks to be a very solid Roon platform. I’ll try to do more comprehensive testing later… Stay tuned.
8 Likes