I pulled the trigger. I had been debating over a Nucleus, mini PC, or a Mac for my core, but my big hangup was, “What if I don’t want to pay for Roon at some point?” and then I have a device that is of no use. I am a long-time Mac user, so I went with the Mini. Since I want this thing to have a life beyond Roon, despite that being its main use, I had to spec up to a $1,100 model. The thing is faster than my M1 Max Studio (but I appreciate the extra memory/ports/SD reader on the Studio).
My only concern is that I have to restart Roon on my Studio daily. Something about when this computer sleeps, Roon loses the system speakers on awakening it. It’s getting to be a real hassle, and a major driver for getting Roon off of my main computer. Since the Mini will be set to never sleep, that should not be an issue at least.
workarounds for your issues are easy… turn of cloud relay , private network. use a app like amphetamine to keep the drive and ports awake.
and if you are on MacOs15 and Roon looses connection to your endpoints, turn on a vpn server , turn it off and they are all back.
hardwired connection takes care of weak wifi as well.
im also leaning towards a M4 Pro Mac mini. I want to use it for at least 4-5 years and also be able to use at least some of the AI stuff in photoshop and other apps. also the pro seems to be a sweet little machine for some gaming… and I don’t need it for work related stuff before march 2025. gives me enough time to wait for benchmarks and MacOS updates
Looks like the Basic M4 Pro should be up there with the M2 studio Max … and that’s insane peformance.
also looking forward to use the M4 mini with a 5k Display
My dCS Bartok wants its input from the Roon program to be Ethernet not USB for best SQ.
Will this mini devise output on highest quality via Ethernet?
Thanks
Yes, the Mac Mini has an Ethernet port. Otherwise it would not be suitable as a Roon server because the Roon server should always use a wired connection.
I run Roon on an ancient NUC with Intel(R) Core™ i3-4010U CPU @ 1.70GHz and 8G of RAM.
Yes, the new mini is powerful enough for Roon. Overkill actually.
Any thoughts on fan noise?
I am currently using a NUC that was placed in a fanless case, so it is 100% silent.
My Roon server is placed in (my son’s) bedroom, so (lack of) fan noise is VERY important…
Just installed a Mini M4 (base model) for various server duties. As expected Roon runs fine – and I’ve yet to hear the fan come on. The Mini is tucked away in the TV cabinet now, so I doubt if I’ll ever get to hear it…
Mac’s are very quiet. I’ve never heard my old 2014 Mac Mini’s fan kick in. Let alone my current M1 MacBook Pro running my Roon Server.
The only thing I am hearing is the soft noise coming from the USB hard drive which holds my Roon local library. If I were to replace that with an SSD the whole system would be completely silent.
Here’s iStatistica Pro on the M4 Mini (inside the cabinet). The fan appears to be running at a steady 1000RPM – I guess this is the base level. It is inaudible, even when taken out of the cabinet and held next to my head. It is barely warm to the touch.
The Mini is running Roon (Server), Spotify (scripted), Plex Media Server, Unifi Network Server, BetterTouchTool + trigger server and the Flic app at all times. Sometimes there’s a bit of HQP Player and/or other audio apps going on.
CPU-wise it appears to be running on the efficiency cores for the most part:
Memory is fine. It’s funny to see how the 8GB vs. 16GB RAM debate has not at all ended after Apple raised the base to 16GB for all models, but has shifted seamlessly to 16GB vs 24GB (or more).
I think I will just get the base M4 mini… after seeing all the reviews of „professionals“ that do so much more with some software I’m going to use I’m sure the m4 will be more than fine and run circles around my M1 Air.
I have an M4 Mini and was just wondering how to replace the Intel version of Roon. I did a Time Machine restore of an older iMac and have the wrong version of Roon – but it works fine.
Yes, but Dennis runs Time Machine, I didn’t want to complicate it.
Sure, but using Roon‘s built-in backup scheduling and then backing up the resulting backup folder with Time Machine or similar accomplishes the same thing automatically.
I think for my use case the way I do it works best but in general what you’re suggesting would also work. I do use Roon’s backup to a separate disk but as that particular computer is used as a dedicated Roon Server I don’t need to back it up very often. In addition, I’ve used Time Machine backups multiple times to upgrade to more capable servers. I started with a 2010 Mac Mini, used Time Machine to setup a 2012 Mini, then a 2014 and finally a 2018 Mini. Next up will be an M4 Mac Mini.
Yeah, the occasional TM backup, with Roon Server being shut down, can be convenient for a migration. However, it requires care and some knowledge
As the Roon Server runs mostly invisibly in the background, it’s easy to forget quitting it before bashing up with TM.
Migrating the control app to a new machine is fine it the old one is taken out of service. However, if the old one stays in use, it creates identical clones of the control app (identified by an ID value in a hidden file), and we have seen much trouble on the forum that was caused by this.
Therefore, the safer official recommendation makes sense, IMHO. As is always the case in computing, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t alternatives for those who know what they are doing.
