Running Windows or OS X with Roon? Which is better?

[Dimitris71 (dimitris)]

Any experience on both what do you think is better for Roon?

[Allen_H]

I run both. If you want/need to use AirPlay, Mac is better. if you want/need ASIO to your DAC, Windows is better. Otherwise I find no difference.

[Dimitris71 (dimitris)]

Thank you very much for your reply I am new to this, I already have a as rock mini PC but thinking of purchasing a Mac mini for running Roon so before buying a Mac I would like to hear some experience.

[Allen_H]

Here is an example of what I am saying. I was running Roon on a Mac Mini, but my DAC can only send native DSD256 files via ASIO, which is only available on Windows. So I switched Roon to Windows. However, I already had the Windows PC. I would not have bought a new PC just for the marginal gain of native DSD playback. Functionality, performance, and GUI are virtually identical on both Mac and PC.

[Rugby (aka Daniel or Big Dan)]

I would go with windows. I have personally seen fewer issues on the Windows side of things. Since Roon is based on .NET I think it just works smoother in the Windows environment.

[Dimitris71 (dimitris)]

Thank you Rugby

[Skywatcher]

roon team has mentioned a couple of times that roon is faster on windows.
I run it on a Mac with no issues but may go the wiindows route in the future when I get a dedicated PC for roon.

[mrvco]

Mac Mini, Roon Server runs perfectly fine.

[Allen_H]

FYI, if you have a Mac Mini, you can always run Windows natively using Boot Camp, so you have the best both worlds.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Allen_H

If you want/need to use AirPlay, Mac is better.

For Roon, this does not matter, as we do not use the Apple services for discovering or speaking to Airplay devices. The same Airplay related code runs on Windows, Mac, and upcoming Linux builds.

@Rugby is right about the .NET thing… and just as @Skywatcher said, the code will perform slightly better on Windows than on Mac or Linux.

BootCamp has always left me with a bitter taste in my mouth… it generates too much heat, as the power management drivers never seem to be as good as they are on “true” Windows machines. I guess the Dells, HPs, and others actually write better drives for their primary OS than Apple does for a tack-on.

Your AS Rock mini is probably underpowered for Roon. It’ll run fine, but things will be slower than you could have it be.

This is a great thread about hardware, especially post 20 by @brian

Suggested hardware

It feels like the answer to most “will it work?” questions is going to be “It’ll work, but it won’t be as good as it could be”, because lets be honest, no-one is going to wonder whether a Mac Pro works flawlessly or not. I want to expand a little bit more to help you guys understand where the tradeoffs are so you can make good hardware decisions. As we’ve said above, Roon will run on just about anything vaguely recent. How much hardware you need to get an impeccable experience depends on how yo…

[wizardofoz (Mr Fix It aka The Wiz)]

This might be worth noting here

Roon on macOS not working with huge library

Hi, I tried to use Roon for large library of 70k albums (DSD, HiRes, and CD in AIFFs). After completing the import of all albums Roon took 5 min to launch, 3 minutes to search anything, 1 minute to start playback of a song, and was having dropouts on playback of any song. Set-up: 2015 Mac Mini, i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB PCIe flash SSD, OS X El Capitan 10.11.6, music on Synology NAS and internal PCIe SSD. I decided to erase macOS, re-install Roon alone on Mac, import music from zero step by step. …