Roon on M1 Mac Mini runs great

Don’t hold your breath for too long. Roon’s apps are based on a cross platform framework (probably Qt). That framework must be updated first, then Roon can tweak their app on top of that to take full advantage of the M1. My guess is you’re looking at the first half of 2022 for full M1 compatibility – best case scenario (unless Roon ditches their cross platform strategy and starts writing fully native apps from scratch for Mac/Win/iOS/etc).

What do you mean for pcie 4.0? To my knowledge, the new Mac does not support any external pcie device.

I believe the SSD is just a separate chip, nothing really special. I think the secret sauce here is just M1’s raw performance and the unified memory, and Apple did a pretty good job on Rosetta 2 .

PCI is part of these machines as they have been in previous Intel Macs. Thunderbolt is a PCI technology where PCI is extended on a serial connection versus an expansion card. This is why eGPUs have worked before (well, at least in Intel machines).

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw out in the future some kind of Apple designed bus powered eGPU box that plugs into a Thunderbolt port using the same tech that Apple uses inside the M1…just with more cores and using a lot less power.

Both my minis support 192Khz. Check the settings on your M1

1 Like

Roon’s apps are based on a cross platform framework (probably Qt).

Edit: removed most os my post in which I speculated roon is built on top of Electron/JS

As the post following mine clarifies: it is actually mono (dot net based runtime).

This here can stay:
But looking at the pace of innovation of Roon for the past 2 years… who knows when they will care to convert.

1 Like

It’s based on mono Roon migrating to .NET Core 2.0 and banishing Mono?

1 Like

OK I’ve had some success and some failure. First the success. Having connected to my receiver via HDMI, It now shows me 48KHz, 192KHz and 768KHz. The old Windows Machine topped out at 192. The bad news is that I cannot set to Exclusive Audio and so everything really tops out at 48KHz. This could be a Big Sur/kextless issue or it could be an M1 specific issue.

I can switch exclusive on, but when I do, it reports Audio device in use and play moves to the next track which reports the same and you have to try to hit pause before it starts the next track or it will go on until the end of the playlist.

You mean the receiver showing you 768kHz over HDMI? I don’t think HDMI audio is capable of that.

If you meant Roon showing 768kHz, then the OS mixer outputs 48kHz in non-exclusive mode, the downsampling makes sense to me.

And if you use a Roon Ready player or Roon Bridge over network, you don’t need exclusive mode.

Any official word from Roon when native M1 support can be available?

I have a late model 2012 Mac mini and it runs like a champ. Never had one crash and it has 16 gigs of RAM with an SSD. By extension, the new M1 chip w 16 gb should be PLENTY.

It is possible it will be a while, if the application depends on 32bit code, it won’t be ported any time soon as Apple have ceased their support for 32bit code in newer MacOS Releases. Mono itself can be ported to native M1 and I have run various Mono tests, apart from Forms which requires 32 bit code.

Audio does seem a bit different though. My HDMI is showing up to 8 channels (7.1) of 16-24bit 48KHz Integer audio (in Audio/Midi Setup) or alternatively Encoded digital streams up to 768KHz. Which probably means that if it is correctly formatted, Roon could send any supported bitstream eg. DSD or DTS. Unfortunately 24bit 48Khz audio is all which is coming out at the moment, no matter the source. It still sounds fine, but it’d be nice if I can get the 192KHz Stereo I could get in Windows. Despite setting system audio to speakers instead of HDMI, I am still unable to get exclusive audio playing. HDMI 2 is capable of 1536KHz and up to 32 channels. I don’t know if any of us know fully what the M1 HDMI is capable of or how that is supposed to be harnessed under Big Sur

I am still considering a Mac mini but 192K 24bit would be essential for me

Hope that this hints that it’ll be sooner than first half of 2022.

1 Like

Sounds like they just got some new hardware M1 and ran the current version of Roon on it. Nothing special there – almost every app runs fine with no tweaks. I’d pay more attention to the ambiguous statement “something we are looking into for the future”. Especially since the current app seems to run well, and the M1 is so fast even for emulation, what would be the benefit for them to take time to make it M1 native? Given that they already don’t care about making native apps for the platforms that run Roon Server and Roon Remote. I see this happening only if it’s some kind of checkbox that they can tick and the underlying framework (.NET, somebody said) takes care of the rest.

I have compiled Mono (.net for non Windows machines) on the M1 with no problem.

Well it doesn’t run well for me. I’ve had nothing but problems since running Roon on an M1 machine. Actually it worked fine for a couple of days, then started to fall apart. First it quit seeing my desktop DAC even though the system, Tidal, etc. still saw it and worked just fine. Now it can’t even find the Core on my network. I’ve wiped out and reinstalled Roon three times on the M1 - doesn’t work at all now.

That sucks. Hopefully if they get more reports of it not working well, it’ll give them more incentive to fix it quickly – especially since their target market of Hi-Fi customers tend to be early adopters for new tech. I will selfishly hope that they improve the iOS remote app at the same time because it’s really a mess.

1 Like

My Mojo works fine in exclusive mode on the M1. This appears to just be a problem with the HDMI audio interface. I’ve raised it on the Feedback app.

1 Like

Disable firewall

It’s off on both the server and the M1. Every other device gets through to the Core just fine. M1 just can’t find it. And they are definitely on the same network. Thanks!