I am a little confused. I run Roon on a dedicated headless MacMini.
From what I have understood, there is no longer a dedicated server and client program, but only ‘Roon’.
So I have installed a recent version from the Roon website onto my MacMini and added ‘Roon’ to my ‘Open at login’ list.
Now when I startup my MacMini and do a screenshare, I see the normal Roon interface on my MacMini. That seems normal. Now, when I click on the little Roon-image on the top menu bar, it has an option ‘Launch at Startup?’. If I select that, the item ‘RoonServer’ instantly appears in my ‘Open at login’ list!
This leaves me with two different Roon instances there:
The Roon Server is the background program that does all the audio stream handling, downloading, DSP etc.
Roon is the graphical control program.
The server can be on the same computer as in your case, or server and control program can be on different machines.
To be precise, there are no separate installers anymore, but the functions still exist. It’s just that the one „Roon“ installer installs both the Roon and Roon Server programs.
It’s impossible to avoid confusion for 100% of several hundred k users. Someone will always be. In the past there was also confusion about why there is Roon Core and a separate Roon Server installer.
same here, I just killed “Roon” from Startup Items. 1,6 GB less consumption of Ram. Im running my m2- Roon Server headless as well, if you don’t need to see the GUI on the Server you can just stop this instance running. Don’t know if its intended like this…
Roon installs two Roon programs on your computer. One is Roon Server and the other is Roon (client). When you boot up your computer, the Roon Server program starts automatically and runs in the background. If you don’t want to use your computer as a Roon server, go to the bottom right corner of your computer screen and click on the upward facing arrow, then right click on the Roon Icon. There, you can remove the “Launch at startup” checkmark and also Quit the Roon server program.
To use the Roon client, simply click on the Roon Icon on your desktop or Start Menu or Task Bar, etc. If you don’t want to use it, don’t open it.
Well this is a behavior i didnt saw on any of my macs. Installing Roon at first just installs the „roon remote“. By setting up, and if you click yes, the roon server will be started. I have no roon server instance running on my macBook, which i am using for controlling roon.
But if you setup roon as server, both instances are running, like on my mini. And if you dont need the GUI of Roon, because its just a headless machine running somewhere, you can just switch off the GUI called „Roon“, and roon server will do run as background task without any UI…
So there will be some less RAM Usage, this is the whole point i wanted to share.
I have my server on a Nucleus One and just deleted the server on my Mac. The Mac is only working as a remote and everything is working fine.
Hope I didn’t do anything wrong .
When I installed Roon on my MacMini, it installed both the Roon server and the Roon client. I use it as both, at times, with access via Splashtop. If I did not want to use the Roon server, I would do as I described above. If I did not want to use the Roon client, I would not click on it. If you don’t start one of the programs, they don’t use any CPU or RAM.
EDIT: Roon remote is a third Roon program for phones and tablets.
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