Roon server unstable on M1

I moved from old Mac mini to new Mac mini. I have seen Roon disappear (not exactly crash, no crash report) and I find I have to restart Roon about twice a week (I use Screen Sharing from my laptop). I too am hard wired. Sounds like my problems are not as severe as yours.

I have also moved from a very old Mac mini to an m1 and while my browsing speeds have improved, stability seems worse as I observe glitches I didnā€™t have before. My problems arenā€™t as bad as described here; though maybe because I have overnight automatic shutdown scheduled on the core.

What I mainly see are dropouts on one of my endpoints that happen about 10-30s after I start a song. It doesnā€™t stop the music but causes audible stutter. I am pretty confident itā€™s not network related, because the fix that 100% of the time resolves the issue is to restart the Roonserver process.

The only time Iā€™ve had dropouts on my mini is when Roon Server was using a stupidly large amount of RAM, normally quite a few days after I start the core (and donā€™t reboot). How much RAM do you have installed, and how big is your library? As youā€™re restarting the core each day I suspect this probably isnā€™t the issue, but if you only have 8GB and a large library RAM usage might be the culprit.

Iā€™m still running Roon Core on an old MacMini quad core i7, 16 GB RAM, ethernet to router. Since the last update Roon has disappeared several times. Screen Sharing reveals and entirely black screen and which cannot be controlled.

Roon hasnā€™t exactly crashed as it will continue to function from a controller, iPad, M1 Macbook etc, but the i7 running Core is unreachable. Only a hard restart resolves the issue. Iā€™ve tried deciphering Crash reports but confess itā€™s beyond me.

I have 8G ram and about 100K tracks in the lib (though they are almost all Qobuz tracks). I swapped the core again with the older intel mac mini 2010 (also 8G ram) and the issue disappeared; though things are a bit slower now. I can live with that and will send the M1 unit back.

After years of fighting with roon on macos I tried out a SonicTransport and almost all the issues went away. I use mac, iphone, ipad to connect and manage it and it works great now.

ā€“Peter

Iā€™ve never had any issues running Roon on a Mac.

Iā€™ve also never had any real problems running Roon on an old i5 Mini or on my new M1 Mini. Maybe itā€™s because Iā€™ve run ONLY Roon on them? I donā€™t reboot on a regular basis or restart Roon. I have the Mini set to never sleep. I only have 8gb of RAM and itā€™s just fine. I frequently use Activity Monitor and RAM usage has never been above about 5.5 gb, but usually stays below 5. I will say that maybe once a month I get the spinning rainbow wheel that locks up my ability to navigate Roon but doesnā€™t interfere with playback. I just force quit Roon and restart it and it works perfectly again. Right now the Mini is both my core and my endpoint, it feeds my standalone DAC directly and sounds fantastic. Iā€™m in the process of auditioning separate streamers/end points to feed the DAC and reduce the Miniā€™s job to just the core. Results so far have made it clear that leaving the Mini to continue to do it all is very much a possibility. Anyone that says you MUST have a separate rendering device is misinformed. The M1 Mini does a pretty fantastic job of handling everything by itself (other than D/A conversion, Iā€™m a big believer in a top-notch DAC).

Glad to hear it works for some people. Probably why Roon support couldnā€™t solve my issues. But Iā€™ve had many (just search for my posts). Tried dedicated machines with direct connect external drives, etc, changing network components, end points, etc. Nothing worked until I moved off the mac.
Mostly listening to ripped CDs, 210,000 tracks.

Since moving from my old Mac mini to an M1 it is a regular battle. Most mornings I need to find the core with my iPad. Then many times roon wont see my endpoints, Lumin and Sonos in particular. Often just stops playing a track mid way or just stops at the end of an album and I have to reload another song or album. I have Roon Radio on but it often does not take over. my network is basic but robust with no issues outside of Roon. This is quite annoying given the time these M1 machines have been out. How hard can it be to write an app that actually works reliably?
Donā€™t get me wrong here. When it works it is amazing especially through my X1. Quite the best digital sound I have ever heard. Itā€™s just this constant glitching that is so damn frustrating made worse by the really annoying customer service system Roon has adopted.

Is your M1 wired? or using WiFi?

Is your Mac firewall running?

I would suggest you create a new partition/volume and install BigSur ā€¦ Iā€™m still not happy with the way Monterey runs on my M1 Mini but BS is plain sailingā€¦using Roon Server.

Then just do a migration of your Monterey user into BS and try that.

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The M1 is wired to a node in my Asus mesh system. Firewall is running and allowing incoming connections from Roon.

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