Roon Server on MacOS vs full Roon app. Benefits to change existing set up?

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi all,
have tried to find an answer to this in the forum - apologies if my question has already been answered.

I’ve been a very happy Roon user for a long while now, and run the core on a MacMini. When I first installed it, the Mini was also serving my main listening room (hooked directly to the DAC). That has long since changed and the Mini now sits with all the networking equipment in another room, with various RPis as endpoints in the house.

Recently I have started to see slowdowns on delivery of music. Talking about a delay from pressing play to the track starting. it happens both with tracks stored in FLAC on my separate server and with Qobuz tracks. Same with searches sometimes. There is a thread on this - and the suggested reboot of the core does take care of it for a while. The Mini has the max (for it) of 8GB RAM. I don’t need the full Roon app on the Mini anymore (it can be headless), so 2 questions:
1/ would running Roon Server as opposed to “full Roon” make a significant improvement to responsiveness (ie lower RAM / CPU usage), and - more importantly,
2/ if I did move to Roon Server, how can I do that without losing all the metadata etc which I have lovingly input over the years?

Thanks very much. I suspect there’s a simple answer to this!
best wishes

Andrew

2

How many tracks are in your library? And what speed is your mini, ie the CPU.

If you take some music and load it on the mini so it is local, do the local files have the same “Slowness” or is only sources accessed over the network from the mini.

3

Thanks Daniel. I have just under 30k tracks in the library, combination of FLACs on the server and Qobuz favourites. It’s a 2.4Ghz mid 2010 mini - relatively old but still going strong.

I loaded a couple of tracks onto the Mini’s hard drive and found the start up time of those hi res files was indistinguishable from the server stored ones. However, since it’s an intermittent issue that may not be always the case!
best wishes

Andrew

4

Could it be a sleep issue, say the mini putting the drive where the files are stored to sleep, and it requiring a couple of secs to spin up ?

5

Thanks - interesting question. I don’t think that should be the case, the files are on a Supermicro server which should never sleep, but as you say perhaps it’s with the Mini itself. Also, this does happen with Qobuz streamed tracks so I don’t think it would be only local storage issue.