Running Roonserver on Ubuntu 20.04

IOANNIS_CHARALAMPOUS · December 17, 2020, 2:11pm

Hello to everyone,

I recently decided to try roon with my tidal subscription…my mane source of music. I installed roon on my windows10 laptop and selected to use the roon app and the core,output in one pc. Everything is great sound quality wise and the user experience is great.

I am making efforts to move from windows to a complete linux configuration so from now I dual boot with Ubuntu too. I tried and installed successfully roonserver (without roonbridge) to my ubuntu os and I am driving it with roon remote (ios) with no problems.

The only problem is that the sound quality of roonserver in linux is noticeably worse than the one on win10 outputting with asio. Now I have configured the /etc/asound.conf and /home/user/.asoundrc files to “hw” as they should so dmix is bypassed and alsa is using my usb dac (ifi micro idsd) directly without any (software) conversions. The signal is not going through any sample rate conversions.

The thing is that the quality of the sound is much worse to the point that I can’t just ignore it or accept it. I would appreciate any help to the matter cause I would really like to keep using roon with my linux setup and slowly dump windows.

Thanks in advance for any input.

PeterD · December 17, 2020, 4:31pm

Coming from Roon Core on mac osx to Ubuntu Server 20.04.1 LTS i noticed no change, neither positive or negative.
The hardware remained the same, a Mac Mini i7 late 2012.

IOANNIS_CHARALAMPOUS · December 17, 2020, 6:09pm

Thanks for replying,

There shouldn’t be any difference…but there is a clear one. I can not explain it and I am seeking help cause maybe there are some ALSA configurations that I need to do which i am not aware of? Everything in linux can be done through the terminal so maybe here there is someone that can guide me to it.

I have also read the ALSA documentation and done everything according to the guidelines to ensure bitperfect playback.

I should mention that ifi doesn’t support drivers for linux but the dac is plug n play through usb class 2 generic drivers in linux. Could that be a problem?

Hans_Pijper1 · January 13, 2021, 10:47pm

I don’t know where youe problem is, I use the Roon with Linux 20.04 LTS as a server, an when I put a USB soundcard to it , it can be used as a player., an you see it in your list.