Here’s the post that @mjw was referring to:
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YES I concur,everyone else does Jriver,Audirvana, maybe now that Harman have control it may expand the reach.
If this is important to you, please vote for it using the Vote button at the top of the thread. “Me too” posts don’t count.
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I have a Mac Mini running Asahi Linux. I want to use this hardware as my home server. Every software I’m using will run fine except RoonServer.
Please also provide a version for ARM based machines.
There are plenty of machines out there in the meantime using an ARM based processor (new Raspberry PIs, all Apple Silicon Devices, …).
I tried running the Server with box64 but had no luck so far and I think that also should not the desired way.
Adding a new build target architecture really shouldn’t be big of a deal 
So I kindly ask you to provide it with the next releases.
Thanks
Roon Labs said they are open to it once ARM warrants the effort. On Mac hardware they do provide it for macOS, of course, but Asahi is hardly common yet.
For Windows platforms, Microsoft and Qualcomm will probably first have to get their act together after so many years, but they don’t: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
I think Asahi on a MacMini is an optimal solution for little home servers. Currently it’s not extremely common, but I think it will soon rise as apple pushed more and more hardware.
And as I said, building for an additional architecture is not that big of a problem but would make so many people happy. Why not being ahead of time and support even a smaller but vastly growing number of possible use cases with very little effort?
Having beim involved in porting commercial Intel software to ARM, I can say for a fact that it’s not just a simple rebuild, especially if you use any assembler code of course, which I’d bet they do for performance critical parts.
Growing 300% from 1 to 3 people, probably
I’m pretty sure that they don’t use any assembler code! I also work with dotnet applications in my daily work and if done right, compiling for an additional architecture should really not be that big of a deal. Especially if the application doesn’t use windows only libraries which Roon does not as they already build for linux
I think you really underestimate the number of people that are interested in that feature.
And I really don’t understand why you are so negative about that topic? Obviously you are not interested in an ARM version, so why are you making this so bad?
This forum should be about the interests and needs of (paying) people and how the community and the developers of Roon could help them to achieve their goal. Nothing else. Solving problems
We’ll have to agree to disagree. Any good software that has performance requirements does
I’m just telling you what Roon Labs have stated before in the many other threads.
I don’t know how much you know about software development, but I - as I work with software developers every day - can say that hardly any one will use assembler code unless you are on embedded devices or you are programming hardware related stuff and even then the developers would stay to the programming interfaces of rust, c++, … Roon obviously is not developed for embedded devices neither does it manage any hardware directly. Most probably they use just the tools they get from their dotnet development environment
And again, this should all about solutions. So why should the developers of Roon not be able to compile for ARM. If there wasn’t a really bad decision in software design, then this should be no big deal. Thousands of software developers has accomplished this task and Roon is no “special” software in all terms. No software or hardware requirements or anything else points out, that it should be a hard task. They even managed it really quick to publish a version for MacOS with Apple Silicon. I have no evidence for problems on building it for an additional linux architecture.
Even Roon itself just said that ARM is not that common at that time (2019-2023) and that’s the reason, they never said it’s not possible. And I see definitely a rising demand for ARM software everywhere.
If you don’t need it, that’s fine 
but please also help others to achieve their goal with different needs.
I and others would love to see an ARM version of Roon. We all love Roon and would make it a even more loved and better software.
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You are totally forgetting DSP. I would bet they use assembler parts there because, you know, performance.
The proof is that if all that is needed was to press the rebuild button, they would obviously have already done so
Obviously it’s possible. Anyway they already run natively on Apple Silicon. Like I said, it needs to make commercial sense. 3 people on Ahasi don’t make commercial sense, one can use macOS anyway, and Qualcomm is a shambles, see the link I posted.
Show me one software developer doing an FFT or convolution in assembler code 
that will never happen in software like this here. These functions are really optimized to their best in all common libraries. No one is doing performance optimization for common software at that level.
The best performance optimization you could do in software development is writing better code (using existing libraries), optimize loops, function calls and memory handling. No one than maybe the military or some researchers at universities is doing here anything on assembler basis.
But all that is not the point. If there is a problem in compiling it for ARM, how could this be solved with little effort by Roon? If it’s just, that there was to little attention for ARM in the past, so please let people join the topic and argue about why they want to use it with ARM processors instead of finding reasons, why their decision might be bad.
Everyone has reasons for using his or her desired system…
One thought on the why not they so far decided to support ARM: that would mean that all supporting activities, like testing and validation must be performed on ARM also, which is additional cost. Big software vendors like IBM, Oracle decide not to support all kind of Linux distros, only a few, mostly because they do not want to build out the test and support infra and org for all. Rumors say this is why Oracle was never supported on FreeBSD. I would love to have my roon core running on an RPI5 with an NVME shield, and hope that the recent entry of ARM on the PC arena will motivate roon to reconsider their decision.
As a dedicated user of Roon, I am disappointed to see the lack of support for Roon Core on ARM64 platforms. Given the increasing prevalence and potential of ARM64 technology, it is disheartening that we cannot take full advantage of Roon’s capabilities on these systems.
I hope that in the future, the company considers developing and releasing a version of Roon Core that supports ARM64. This would not only benefit many current users but also open doors to new ones who rely on ARM64 systems for their high-performance needs.
Thank you for your attention to this matter and for considering the feedback from your loyal user community.
I think the decision is already overdue. There are already so many m1 and m2 with arm64 under Linux.
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This seems to be a very conscious strategic decision, especially after Audirvana released the headless version of Audirvana Studio for ARM for half the price of roon but with a significantly smaller feature set (and with better sound quality according to a few testers). If you need the features Audirvana is missing and willing to operate a dedicated roon core you will not switch anyway. If you are like me, running a single system and mostly listening to music and not tampering with the fancy features, and do not see why you would need an extra PC for that besides the RPI roon bridge, you are not the targeted consumer of roon. Plain and simple, and no offense taken, not the first time I realize I am not the targeted audience of a product and move on to one better fitting my needs at a more reasonable price. I wish all the best for roon and the user community, I might be back as it is not a bad product at all, I just do not need it at the moment, especially not at double price than the competition, and can save some bucks on electricity also switching off the roon core.
Thank you for the opportunity to address community-related issues here. Is there any news in this regard?
We have Asahi Linux on Apple Silicons everywhere, these are powerful devices. There is the Raspi 5 in the world.
I understand and respect why that decision was made, but times have changed a lot since then. Now people are running their Roon servers with Docker containers in cross-architecture and multi-architecture mode. This leads to a massive computational overhead. Because people have Roon servers on their arm64 Linux machines, one way or another. So we’d be better off with official support, right? Especially in terms of audio and product quality.
I’d really like to see something change here. Very soon.
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