I have a G Drive thunder bolt 6TB external hard drive with hi res music playing thru my Mac Mini into my Mc Intosh D150 Dac. Several times the songs will stop playing or at times they will start skipping . When this happens I reboot my Mac Mini and everything starts playing again. I first replaced my G Drive hard drive and it would still do it so then I replaced My Mac mini . But sadly at times the music still stops and all that is on my screen is the play list for Roon i can select the next song on Roon but still nothing plays . Roon only works again when I reboot both Mac Mini and external hard drive . I recently upgraded to Roon life time membership.
Please give me some advise I have spent a small fortune . Earl
Can you detail more info about the model and specs of the Macs, what formats you are playing (FLAC/DSD etc) and rates, plus show screen shots of the Signal Path details similar to below. Also what else is the Mac being used for while this happening?
Let’s start troubleshooting by simplifying your setup. Here are a few steps to get started:
Copy a few albums from your external drive to the Music folder on your Mac’s internal drive. Once you have done this, please disconnect the external drive from the computer.
After disconnecting the drive, play the local copy album to the McIntosh D150 DAC in loop/repeat mode. Do this for a period of time to see if playback gets into a broken state. If you are able to reproduce this behavior, this would indicate an issue with how the Mac mini is interacting with the DAC.
To confirm that the Mac -> DAC interaction is the culprit, you should then play the same album to the “Built-In Output” zone in Roon. You can enable this zone in the Settings > Audio screen. I believe this will cause playback to occur on the Mac mini’s internal speaker, feel free to mute playback during this test.
If playback is stable when playing the local copy if the album, this would indicate that the issues lies with the external drive.
