Apple announced the Mac mini M4 / M4 Pro today. Safe to say Roon Server will work on this without issues?
EDIT: I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t sufficiently powerful. My question was about compatibility. Since Roon Server already works on the M2 Mini, theoretically it should work with the M4 Mini. But I guess, we won’t know until somebody tries it.
It looks great, lots of connectivity, small, and no power brick. Will it be powerful enough for Roon?
I’m still using a very underpowered Mac mini 2014 (compared to the Mac mini 2024) without any problems. It handles my 1,000+ album (local + Qobuz) library and even does DSP (MUSE) without breaking a sweat.
I’m currently running my Roon Server on a base model M1 MacBook Pro with 8 gb of RAM. It runs my 3 zones at the same time when necessary, with volume leveling. And it has 0 issues with Roon ARC.
I currently have a 7224 album / 81558 track library. It doesn’t break a sweat. Even my former Roon Server (2014 Mac Mini with 8 gb of RAM running on Linux) ran Roon just fine.
The M4 is basically overkill for just Roon.
Im Running a M1 8gb MacBook Air. Usually only 1 Zone. And I have under 1000 Local Albums (14k tracks). All I do is multichannel downsampling or some upsampling here and there. Even DSD512 works fine in Roon , but would be nice to have a more powerful machine for HQplayer (and I do some Fusion 360 CAD for work).
the thing is the Base M4 Mac mini has “only” 16gb ram and no Thunderbolt 5.
Base M4 Mac mini with 24gb ram is an additional 230 euro. brings the price to 930 euro in the EU! (still no thunderbolt5.)
the m4 pro with 24gb ram and a 512gb SSD is 1649 euro, (1399 USD in the US).
So not sure what do get really… a Nuc for Roon and a base M4 Mac mini or the M4 Mac mini with 24gb ram.
A NUC will probably be cheaper, you can put an internal drive in it for music, but with ROCK its single purpose. A Mac Mini looks sexy, no power brick, but needs an external music drive, can use it for other things. Apple are clever with their good/better/best price points, but the minimum spec is way more than enough for Roon.
I have a similar question. I am looking at an M4 Mini to replace an aging i5 sonicTransporter which has served me very well for almost 9 years but lacks the horsepower to apply DRC to higher rate DSD.
Any thoughts on config from those of you running Roon on Mac Minis? At first blush even the base M4 config looks like overkill but the thing is so cheap (15% of the price of an i9 sonicTransporter) that I would happily upgrade CPU and/or memory if it made sense for future-proofing.
Single-use headless Roon Server. Small library (25k tracks) on a separate NAS so no need for storage and never use multi-zone.
Grateful for any clues for the clueless.
There are a couple of threads with suggestions if you search, basically just disable spotlight and energy saving settings. My personal experience led me to the conclusion that 16GB is required, I would probably upgrade to 24GB just for future proofing it, otherwise, the new M4 models look amazing - at least on paper.
Thanks. Yes, question is if the memory will be upgradable post hoc like the old Mini or soldered in like the MacBooks. I don’t think there have been any teardowns yet?
Nope, nothing internal is upgradeable post purchase, the M4 is a SOC: system on a chip. It is what it is. Hence the need to choose wisely 
I can already apply room correction and convolution filters to DSD files or multichannel 192khz 7.1 files (upsampled to DSD512) with my M1 MacBook and 8gb of ram.
But a M4 with 16gb ram will be better for HQplayer … that’s where my M1 is already getting problematic with DSD128 (DSD256 works with hiccups but the CPU is at 75 degree cels…
The pro has also double the memory bandwidth… that’s also good for HQplayer .
But just for roon a M4 should be plenty good even with multiple zones and DSP
OK, looks like a basic M4 with 32GB of RAM then. That should last me a while! Thanks for the pointers.
The M2 is amazing run Roon with 16 gm ram,256 gb hard drive.
I hope to replace my 2012 MAC Mini with one of these…looks like it would do the trick…I have another M1 Mini I use for my Room Correction with my Roon Library. I like the smaller form factor…
Probably overkill… roon on a Mac / Linux / windows server will use swapping to the SSD if you run out of memory.
Roon Rock keeps everything in Ram and just crashes when you run out of Roon.
My M1 has been swapping To its 256gb SSD is After 4 years still way over 94% SSD Health.
Overkill in some (maybe many) respects but afaik Roon on MacOS still goes through Rosetta 2 and consequently suffers from sub-optimal memory utilization and other side effects. On top of that HQplayer can’t use the super-powerful GPUs as they don’t have APIs for FP64+ which HQP requires. But it’s still one helluva machine for the money and should completely smoke most NUCs (suffer from many of the same problems), Nucleus One/Titan etc.
Not for two years
Whoa! Thank you @Suedkiez! Had totally missed this (shame on me) as I have been running (very happily) on a sonicTransporter for the last 9 years. This completely cements my choice.
Amazing how time flies 
