Running a Nucleus and iTunes and new additions to my library

Roon Software Discussion Nucleus
1

Hi

I am about to purchase a Roon Nucleus. I have lifetime membership of Roon and need some advice.

My current library, almost entirely ALAC from CDs, is held in iTunes. I need to keep this intact so I can burn new CD purchases to ALAC and add to my library. I also need iTunes because I sync my iPhone with it and it provides me with music in my car and when travelling by other means.

I am going to put a 1TB SSD in the Nucleus so the first question is what is the best way to copy my library over to the Nucleus. I have an external USB drive which I use as my iTunes back up. I could also, I suppose, do it over the network from my MacBook Pro, but what about moving forwards? If I add a CD to my iTunes library how will it copy across to the Nucleus?

The Nucleus will be located a fair distance from my router and my computers are connected by WiFi. Running a Cat 6 ethernet cable is not straightforward in my house so I was thinking that I might buy an Airport Express or similar so that I can connect the Nucleus to that and then to the router by WiFi. Will that work well?

Thanks for your help.

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What I have done that may be of interest to you:

  1. Bought and installed a Nuc JOCK (that’s an over-specced ROCK) with two largish external USB drives to hold music files and Roon backups.
  2. Physically moved my iTunes library to the Storage folder in JOCK. Drag 'n drop, as I recall (takes a while). Or use a backup device like Carbon Copy Clone.
  3. Created a second folder (“Roon”)within Storage to hold my new music (mostly flac and DSD format stuff).
  4. Configured JOCK to watch the iTunes and Roon folders mentioned above.
  5. Reconfigured iTunes to open (only) the newly relocated iTunes folder in storage.

Seems to work well. New music acquired via iTunes automatically gets added to Roon. Roon doesn’t know or care that iTunes exists.

As far as wired vs wireless, I will let other speak to that. Wired is “better” but there are numerous Roonies that use wireless to good effect. Search also for a thread on mesh networks.

3

if you do this, make sure you remove Volumes folder from the drive. We have a bug currently that causes issues with that symlink in there.

4

Thanks. Good clarification

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So I suppose I could move my iTunes library to the SSD in the Nucleus and back that up with an external USB drive. iTunes would find the library in the Nucleus over the network . Nucleus would have to be on all the time. Will that work?

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That’s the way mine works. On my iTuned Mac, I mount the Nucleus volume (I think called Rock) using SMB. Mine now mounts at startup (much like you do when … uh, never mind). Easy to operate.

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Several people are having success with mesh networks like the Eero.

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