Roon with a Large Music Library - Solution

Roon Software Discussion
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Please note: I wasn’t sure exactly what section of the Roon Community to place this post. Feel free to move this post to the correct section. Thank you.

I have been using for Roon for over six years and during that time my music library has grown substantially. For most that time my Roon Server was running on a very robust Windows 10 PC, however as my music library increased in size so did problems with getting Roon to work properly increase. Before finding the solution mentioned in the thread title, getting Roon to function properly was quite a challenge. Frequent playback errors (stopping playback for no apparent reason, skipping of tracks and other issues) along with frequent restarts of Roon, aka several times a day, were the order of the day. A recent change in my internet service provider only made all these problems more apparent and frequent. In short, everything seemed to be going wrong, and I was convinced that Roon and large music libraries (a large music library is one with over one million tracks) would never work well together.

I am fortunate to have a very tech savey son-in-law who patiently listened to my near constant complaining about the difficulties I was having with Roon. So, this past holiday season he decided to build me a dedicated server to run Roon and Plex and with enough hard drive space to store all my media (pictures, videos, and music).

The resulting server is a beast. It has six 18TB hard drives with four drives used for storage and two drives used for parity. There are also two solid state drives used for caching. Here are few other specs:

Intel® Core™ i9-9900X CPU @ 3.50GHz

Memory: 64 GiB DDR4

GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

The operating system is UnRaid and both Plex and Roon are running via Docker.

Since getting the server up and running almost all of the issues that I was having with Roon have disappeared. No more playback errors (stopping playback for no apparent reason, skipping of tracks and other issues) and no need for frequent restarts of Roon. A few minor issues still remain, and these mostly have to do with the fact that making changes to Roon’s database, whether by adding lots of new music (local and linked from Tidal and Qobuz) or by editing will cause Roon to run slowly. However, these issues are easily resolved by restarting Roon. Once restarted Roon runs smoothly and is very responsive.

As a bonus, I’ve even managed to get Roon ARC to work, at least while on my home network. I’m still having issues getting Roon ARC to work remotely but I’m hopeful that this to will soon be resolved.

Now I realize that building or buying a dedicated server is not the solution for everyone but if you have a large music library and are having similar issues to those that I was experiencing then perhaps a dedicated server might be the solution for you.

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Hello Jazzfan_NJ,
I am just a Roon user not support or much else but I have had good luck with Tailscale vpn for creating a dedicated pipeline if you will for just sending music from home network to my iPhone with car play. The trick with Tailscale is to use the same sign on for each device which I have recently found out. Tailscale support is very helpful as well and usually responds in a timely manner and broken down pretty well so you can understand even if you don’t get the terminology right away. If you do tons of reading about vpn’s you can figure most of out. If I can figure it out anyone can. Haha! I send most of my music now in hi res and just learning about dsd audio now and car play can play most higher resolution audio with no issues. Hope this helps,
Chris Peterson

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Thank you for the information. At present I have some work arounds for listening to music on the go. In my car I use SiriusXM, which is set to the Real Jazz station, little fuss and good music. When away from home but not in the car, I use a combination of PlexAmp (the music player amp from Plex) for my local music files and either Tidal or Qobuz for everything else. Works great. PlexAmp even has headphone equalization, which is similar to Opra.

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Indeed. What is your cooling/fan solution? That i9-9900X seems to run hot:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?id=3376&cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900X+%40+3.50GHz

The reason I ask is I am in the process of specifying a new roon/hqplayer server but I am gravitating to mobile processors with a relatively low TDP but near desktop performance like the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS.

Maybe in practical terms you are finding fan noise and/or heat a non-issue if the server is not in the listening room?

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Typical TDP seems not to be a reliable indicator for how much heat a CPU will produce in a real-life roon scenario. I mean, most of these powerful CPUs are designed for multitasking or demanding operations such as gaming, rendering or video processing.

If space and amount airflow are non-issues, I would assume that even a high-TDP CPU is not really problematic as one can deploy a bigger fan or several. Letting it heat up is not a solution particularly when being in the same enclosure with magnetic drives. Such do not like heat, and if you have 6 of them 18TB each, they anyways call for an airflow concept as they might altogether produce more heat than the CPU alone.

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I will have the answer later this week when my son-in-law returns from vacation.

UnRaid Dashboard shows a motherboard temperature of around 25 degrees C and CPU tempuratures running between 35 degrees C and 50 degrees C.

Absolutely correct. The CPU typically has loads of under 15% so over heating is not an issue.

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Interesting. From what I can see the max operating temperature of that CPU is 92 degrees C. But you are no where near that.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/189124/intel-core-i99900x-xseries-processor-19-25m-cache-up-to-4-50-ghz/specifications.html

I ran a selfbuild fanless i3 based roon/hqplayer for a couple of years until it failed from overheating about 5 years ago. From memory the TDP of the i3 was 35W and I needed to keep the total TDP below 95W (inc. m/board, power supply, memory, drives etc.) to meet the fanless case specification.

I remember it always ran quite hot to the touch but 5 years is a long time and everything has moved on. My guess is that it was running high TAP hqplayer filters that I preferred that tipped the unit over the top. The current version of hqplayer has even higher TAP filters and also supports native DSD processing which I would like to try so I am interested in experiences like yours with more powerful servers. I don’t remember any response or performance issues with the i3 server that died but from memory it was not supporting a million tracks, maybe 250k-300k

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That does not sound healthy for a fanless case of decent size with internal power supply, until you have a very sophisticated airflow/heatsink concept. Did you monitor the CPU´s and drive´s temperature live while operating? What was the typical reading while everything was busy?

My fanless unit with a less powerful, low-TDP CPU, two big magnetic drives and some kind of ´chimney heatsink´ design always stays well below 30Watts even under heavy load, which is causing the drives to reach their temperature threshold in summer occasionally.

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From memory that was the total TDP supported of all components in the case. It was a streamcom specification. What I remember was that it was quite difficult to find parts under the total TDP threshold so at the time that meant limited CPU and power supply choices etc. Blogs like Audiophile Style used to spec fanless builds on which my build was loosely based.

I don’t recall what temp the build was running at under typical load but it was a dedicated roon/hqplayer server running 3 zones at least 12 hours per day. There was nothing else running on the server. With hindsight the server was probably running close to the max the case could support, it certainly ran hot, and the unit eventually failed after about 2 years. This was 7 to 5 years ago using much earlier, probably less optimised versions of both roon and hqplayer. I would say that except at the beginning when roon was doing analysis, roon load was quite low. It seems much more likely that high TAP hqplayer filters tipped the balance.

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Being as I don’t use HQ Player or much else in the way of DSP, except for Opra when using headphones, the load on the CPU is relatively low. I’m a firm believer in the old adage that you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Hopefully my statement will not be taken as trolling since whether or not one choses to use HQ Player and related software is entirely for that person to decide. I chose not to use this type of software.

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My new “work” computer build is way more powerful than anything I’ve had before (I need 4K60p video editing capabilities at a bare minimum), but it would be complete overkill for Roon. I have a large-ish library with files stored on a NAS (I use SSD only), and run Roon Server on a NUC that’s a few years old running Ubuntu with a rather modest CPU that barely breaks a sweat.

I’m more a believer in purpose-built devices. I don’t like piling tasks together on one system. A NAS is a “computer” built to serve only files. The NUC only runs as a Roon Server, and a few other minor services that barely touch CPU/memory usage. (It’s kind of like a server appliance on my network.) Playback is on a dedicated streamer, not a computer.

In my case, doing a new NAS build with only SSDs was my key to removing lag from Roon–indexing is blazing fast now, and playback of files is much quicker than spinning drives. As the SSDs are typically read from and rarely written to, any concerns for SSD “wear” aren’t an issue. I have a 12 year old SSD (which was not top of the line in its day) in a laptop that does get a lot of writes, and it still tests like new…unlike the laptop itself!

I did find on Win11 that restarting Roon Server once overnight (using scheduled tasks) was important to keep Roon happy, but I can get away with that weekly or monthly on Ubuntu 22 which is what I’m running now. Roon seems to run better for me on Ubuntu, with even lower resource usage and more steady/reliable service to the endpoints. It’s an ideal setup for my use case. (My day job is running servers that use Ubuntu, so I’m more familiar with it that way.)

Same. Why upsample with HQPlayer when my DAC already upsamples to 20x DSD? I never use DSP either, unless it’s on something like a background music system in the house where sound quality isn’t important. My JBL Boombox 2 ain’t gonna care when I’m outdoors wrenching on the hooptie fleet! :grin:

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And purpose-built software. I use simple stand alone programs for task like file tagging, audio file format conversions, image editing, text files, batch file renaming, etc. These small little “one task” programs are load faster and run faster with less bloat.

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FWIW

II also have a large library - 435,000 tracks on 20TB. The files are stored on a NAS using RAID and the Roon server is on an Intel NUC using ROCK. I never have any problems playing music at all, which I usually stream to my stereo system (although I occasionally stream to speakers fed through a Windows desktop). The only issue I have is that searching for albums and loading them can take a few seconds (less than 5 seconds, but it can still be aggravating). I am convinced that this delay is due to the NUC being limited to 32GB of memory.

I have had no trouble using ARC to stream music when I am flying (Delta’s free satellite wi-fi) or using my phone in bed. I have tried to use ARC while on car trips, but it can be very challenging, which I assume is due to my phone being unable to maintain an adequate cellular connection.

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Since you are running some flavor of Linux, you can debug the server to see what is causing your problems. No guessing, do some troubleshooting.