Is there ample evidence that it’s not the best choice?
Semantics of virtualisation aside, the M1 mini is very performant. I agree there is some overhead for virtualisation, until there is a native version, even with that overhead its still very performant. What’s more, possibly more performant than your average intel machine.
If you already own a NUC and are happy with it, grand. If you don’t and are looking for a nice little low energy machine to run your core on, the M1 mini is a great option. And will only get better when a native app is released.
Oh, and obviously the sound quality is improved because it has an apple on it.
Now you are just making stuff up. You bother to make native apps because they will run faster and take better advantage of the hardware. That doesn’t mean that x86 apps can’t run as fast or faster on the M1 than they do on the Intel CPU it replaced.
Roon has said that Roon works “quite well” and “performs excellently” on the M1. See here:
If there were problems found with Roon and the M1, Roon would have come out and said so already. It stretches credulity to suggest there must be problems when none have been found.
Finally, there is no evidence to suggest that Roon Rock running on an Intel NUC is any better than running Roon on the Mac Mini M1. In fact, if you are using DSP, there is no reason to believe the Mac Mini M1 is not more capable by a good margin.
I sighted an issue that was not something most would come up against being 8GB Ram was not enough for a large (over 150K track) library, but it still ran with 270K tracks just swapping into SSD use for memory. Other than that, it outperformed Rock on an 7i7BNH doing DSP related functions like upsampling to DSD512 etc. If you dont have a NUC or dont want to spend on a Nucleus/Nucleus+ then its a fine option to consider if you like the Mac Ecosystem…you also have a 14day no questions return option if you get from an apple store - even online.
@Speed_Racer Dylan at Roon is talking about “testing Roon as part of Apple’s Universal Binary Quick Start Program” He’s talking about software in development: Roon is not currently available as a Universal Binary.
The thread is predominantly about running the Roon client, so when he says that “In the meantime, the current version of Roon will perform excellently on Apple’s M1 hardware” he appears to be talking about the Roon client. The Roon client does work smoothly on the Apple Mac Mini M1. Roon core on the Apple Mac Mini M1, however, has reproducible issues with 192/24 files in long-term testing. This is not something that he reports evaluating.
At no point does Roon compare Roon core on an Intel NUC to Roon core an Apple Mac Mini M1 streaming 192/24 files. I spent days testing that, as documented above, and Roon core running on the Apple Mac Mini M1 generated sporadic dropouts and failures to play 192/24 files. Roon core on a Windows computer under identical testing conditions did not have any problems, and Roon core on an Intel NUC does not have any problems.
In an imaginary world, Roon could come out tomorrow and say “The current version of Roon core running on an Apple Mac Mini M1 is perfectly comparable to Roon ROCK running on an Intel NUC. Choosing between them is simply a matter of platform preference and convenience for the user.” They haven’t said any such thing, but if they did they would be wrong. Car manufacturers sell vehicles all the time that in good conscience they believe to be safe. Then they get into the real world and the issues show up and the recalls are made.
If folks just wanted to know what the manufacturer says, they wouldn’t bother with forums where they can gain a broader evidence base.
Since “accelerated DSP and other resource intensive functionality” are not handled by the client, how could @dylan be talking just about the client?
Only you have reported issues with 24/192 files and it has only been reproducible by you. Just because you had a problem does not mean the problem is present for everyone. You seem to think that Rosetta 2 is some kind marketing gimmick and should not be expected to work and work extremely well with the vast majority of software. Well, you would be wrong…
No one expects Roon to come here and say in a general statement that the Mac Mini M1 is better or worse choice than an Intel NUC. There are many variable there. If you need a lot of processing power, the Mac Mini M1 is certainly and obviously the better choice.
There are basic requirements for the hardware needed to run the Roon core. If those are met you should be good to go. I’m currently running my core on a mid 2012 Macbook Pro and it’s pretty much flawless. If Roon will Roon on a nine year old laptop surely ’ Roon Nucleus verses Apple Mac Mini M1’ is a bit of an academic debate? Both will do the job, and do it well.
That said, if I had to choose I’d go for the mini over the nucleus, but only because I’ve been wedded to the Apple ecosystem since using an SE30 for my postgraduate studies back in the 80s.
Bottom line … Nucleus vs Nuc vs M1 mini vs anything else … I really don’t think it matters all that much, providing you use a device that’s up to spec.
The macOS may be a pig compared to RoonOS. But, does RoonOS running on a compatible NUC actually run the Roon Core any faster or better than the Roon Core running on Mac Mini M1? If so, how?
MacOS updates interrupt, Spotlight and other stuff is constantly indexing, hundreds of processes fighting for time slices forcing context switches, the OS mixer leads to misconfigured systems, etc…
I have to reboot my fully loaded MacBook Pro 16 every month or two because it becomes unbearably underperforming… and the Core i9 in that is a ton faster than any non-gaming NUC.
Most who end up running RoonOS forget it exists. I can’t say that about MacOS.
I’m not saying MacOS is bad, I’m just saying that RoonOS is better at running Roon… That shouldn’t be any surprise though, it was optimized to do one thing.
For what it’s worth - I’m now using the M1 Mac Mini to run my Roon core and it is working GREAT! I had a 2011 Mini that I finally had to retire in December since it could not go any further with the OS needed to run Roon. On the 2011 Mini, it would take a whole day for my Roon library to load (about 4Tb of music on an external HD.) On the new one, it loaded in about a half hour! The only bumps in the road have been remembering to get my settings preferences right so that I can use it headless, accessing it with one of my other devices running Roon remote without having to “wake it up.” (Things like the energy saving settings and such.)
Could always release “RoonOS” for the macs, though I appreciate time is a valuable commodity and there is only so much in a day.
Or better yet open source it (excluding Roon core), and let someone else do it for you. I don’t need to be much of a betting man to bet it’s all based on open source software anyway.
You could still QC builds before releasing etc etc.
Look at it from Roonlabs’s perspective, just off the top of my head:
It’d be a significant ressource drain.
Installing third-party OS’s on Apple hardware is a pain.
NUCs go for a fraction of the price of M1 minis, and they’re oomphy enough.
I’d guess from just the above that you’re suggesting significant ressource drain for maybe a few hundred users in the end: the DiY bar for installing a third-party OS on Apple hardware is higher than installing ROCK on Intel hardware, and the hardware itself is more expensive. You want a dedicated machine ? Go out and buy a NUC8. Won’t be as sexy, won’t be as fast on paper, but it’ll work just fine as is for what you need it to do, no faffing about from you or RoonLabs necessary.
Heh, you make it sound like I have a seat on the board or something and have just taken the ship off course.
I fully recognize that one couldn’t justify spending dev time on a rather niche project.
But the second point is more realistic. Pretending RoonOS is anything but a stock Linux distro with Roon installed and possibly a few tweaks is frankly silly. If roon was to just come clean about it and open source the tweaks (excluding roon core) then the community could improve it. While still allowing roon to control distribution of official roonOS releases etc.
It is a real weakness of Roon for me to be constantly pushed towards a dedicated machine and Roon OS. I just cannot believe that it is not well within the capacity of any general purpose machine to reliably deliver what is after all a tiny amount of data to a DAC. I am not under any circumstances going to spend what is for me a lot of money on a Nucleus, or mess around trying to build a NUC. Most of my music comes from the cloud now, and tiny little boxes like Apple TVs seem to manage fine. If Roon struggle to make their software run ok under Windows and OS X then there is something wrong somewhere, but probably not with Windows or OSX. The other week Roon couldn’t even find Dolly Parton albums, it tells me that the Bach Matthew Passion last 1 minute 43 seconds, and that Mozart is a performer. The idea I should buy a machine dedicated to such incompetence is ludicrous! First cast out the beam out of thine own eye!
That’s because a year into your subscription, you don’t understand what’s difficult about Roon: delivering that tiny amount of data is the easy part (and it’s still a frequent issue, because people think WiFi is magic).
Cool cool. Now take your AppleTV and get from Madonna to Daft Punk in one step, through collaborators.
Just a wild guess:
Dolly Parton sounds like an issue with your streaming content provider, or maybe it was an AWS outage (in which case, assuming it was that and they didn’t have a fallback, that’d be on Roon).
The other two sound like metadata issues, though the Bach thing is puzzling. Mozart sounds like some moron making an edit to metabrainz or something, and it trickling down without being flagged.
I’m not saying this to defend RoonLabs, it’s just that even though it’s an expensive piece of software and we all expect perfection, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s stuff that’s on them (classical could probably be handled better for example), and stuff that isn’t.
Philosophically, I of course agree with you. There are probably good reasons to why that isn’t happening, and I’d be curious to know what they are. I can see of few (like the cost-benefit of having to herd contributors or the likelihood of low engagement or added useless-slash-counterproductive bloat (“heylook, here’s my folder browsing hack”)), but there are certainly many others.
