Suggestion of features 1) Library storage hierarchy cache 2) Off site mode

Samuel, your NAS will already offer you the ability to browse its contents across the WAN. You will need to activate the service in the device’s control panel.
As for the idea of caching, as others have said, this is a very complex solution to get around an occasional issue that your have when your NAS is not available to Roon. You should only need to reconnect the NAS and restart Roon and the unavailable tracks will be restored.
If Roon does implement on the go then I’m sure they’ll work out a system to do it with a few issues as possible but I don’t think it will be along the lines of what you are suggesting.

The NAS is available, so is the 2nd SSD. NAS is much bigger than the SSD. So it is best if Roon is smart enough to know that when a song is duplicated, it will use the copy on SSD. I had to disable the NAS because Roon is not smart enough to do so.

And it is not occasionally issue, Roon is ALWAYS trying to use the NAS copy when I have one in SSD, and Roon ALWAYS cannot recognize my song in the SSD after I disable the NAS connection.

It is ALWAYS IRRITATING

@Samuel_Hau sorry but you’ve found out like many of us that there is a vocal contingent on the roon forum who can’t accept that roon can be better than it is. There’s been one particular thread about roon implementing local caching that had a a lot of resistance based on nothing more than the belief that things are as good as they can get. When those who have experienced it (eg Innuos’ squeezebox beta) see enough merit to warrant investigation.

And on your point of network traffic limits affecting your experience i’m reminded of Hans Beekhausen’s interesting video on NAS vs DAS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taEbRE2mUYU

(Experimental) New option in Roon Settings to allow using our internal player with Roon, enabling RAM playback. Please see setup instructions below.

http://www.innuos.com/en/go/release-1-4-1

They can keep using Roon beta if that’s what they want. Roon has updated to very 1.6. It’s not perfect. If the World consider itself perfect like this we are still stuck with iPhone 3 from Steve Jobs.

Things evolve. I am just raising a feature request, and I have no idea why some other people jump in and declare that “I don’t need that”. I of course can perfectly understand if he/she says “He/she doesnt need that”.

And go on to tell me “technical” without proof. I would have accepted if he/she can provide evidence that providing cache WILL NOT DECREASE NETWORK TRAFFIC. But noone have any evidence to suggest otherwise I would say this is still a valid request!

So you can see both versions when you browse to or search for an album. Have you considered simply hiding the NAS version of the album? In the short term that will do what you want. In the long term, there might be scope for Roon Labs to implement a hierarchical system but one of the techies would have to chime in on that.

I think there are 3 very different issues all intertwined in this thread. It would serve to separate them out otherwise the thread might well circle down the toilet.

I have hidden but all the songs in the playlist becomes “unavailable”.

I think for true integration, Roon should at least attempt to locate the Song/Track in the library!

And for sure I know I CAN 1 album at a time switch my Primary version. But having to do this manually defeats a lot of the purpose of using Roon in the first place. It can be made seamlessly by only a little bit of intelligence

I’m really confused. So you make a playlist from songs on the SSD and when you hide songs on the NAS, the songs from the SSD disappear (by which I assume you mean show as “unavailable”.
Are you certain that the songs that are disappearing from the playlist are on the SSD?

I think I’m with you now. I use 2 external HDD’s on my Roon Rock and I’ve set them as libraries. I am doing this on purpose but I can see how might want to get Roon to always defer to show only 1 copy over another or at least show both but play one in preference to the other.

I think the playlist is created from the NAS version?

Hi @Samuel_Hau,
There is already a cache in Roon. Roon reads the data from file on the storage device much faster that it needs to send that information to the DAC via say USB or RAAT. Ths cache is in memory … where is should be and no user management is required.

I do agree that for remote / offline line mode that having a larger file based cache would be required, from what I understand all (most?) of the mobile streaming solutions do this, but that’s part of that wider Roon Mobile project … I don’t see Roon implementing local file cashing until that project surfaces.

Of course having the music stored locally will decrease network traffic compared to pulling it from the NAS. Nobody is disputing that. But:

a) Why do you want to reduce network traffic? What do you have a network for other than supporting data traffic? Does your network perform badly, do you get interruptions, hiccups? If so, is the network overloaded? It certainly is not overloaded by a Roon pulling music data from the NAS, that’s only 1 % of your Gigabit capacity. If the network is broken, fix it, that’s not a Roon problem.
b) You talk about network traffic compromising sound quality because it is not timing accurate, but that is not possible. You don’t understand how the technology works, or you refuse to accept how it works. Timing inaccuracy creates jitter, but asynchronous protocols like IP and USB remove the wire transport from the timing sensitive chain.
c) If there is something about your NAS setup that produces bad sound quality (you haven’t said that there is), then get rid of it. Direct attached storage is easy and cheap. There is no need for SSD for the file store, if you have a large library and don’t want to pay for SSD, just get a USB hard drive or a few.

Of course you are right, in my frustration I mixed in cross-node sync as an example, shouldn’t have done that. Sync is in fact difficult because of asynchronous protocols, even at the millisecond level, but that’s just a distraction here. Sorry I brought it up.

The nanosecond issue is about sound quality, which the OP has brought up. When we discuss jitter, we measure picoseconds. And that’s what this thread is about.

Sorry for the distraction.

Your assessment is based on average. The network average utilisation maybe not high, but average means nothing when you are listening to music, which depends on real time traffic.

A file copy can wait, video and audio cannot. It means nothing if my network utilisation is very low kost of the time but when there.is sudden burst of activities by my kids playing youtube, wife playing multi room Roon and my NAS tries to backup this or that.

And anyways, I guess you are the.bits are bits camp. There is nothing we can influence each other. A network and computing equipment performing under stress is much noisier than when its low utilized. I.try to minimize that.

Anyways it is a combination of Roon not smart enough to locate tracks across sources manage by it and other factors leading to this.

@Samuel_Hau

Based on this last post, I am not sure why a NAS is being used by you to store music files used by Roon. You could solve all of your problems by using storage attached directly to the Nucleus acting as your Roon Core. There would be no need to use an SSD as a spinner is more than fast enough and can be bought in larger sizes. This would halve the network traffic associated with playing music and would assure that the Roon Core never had to wait for the track data to arrive.

Also, let’s not forget that with switch technology, there is not a lot of traffic on the network seen by all the nodes. At least if you have designed the network so each port on the switch has only one device on it. For example, my Roon Core is on one switch port and my Roon Endpoint (an ultraRendu) is on another. The track data sent from the Core to the Endpoint is not seen by any other node on the network. So this traffic has no effect on other users using Youtube or anything else. In other words, not matter how much music I am playing, it does not affect other users and what other users are doing does not affect the music I am playing. Even you and you wife are using Roon and your kids are using Youtube, network utilization is not an issue.

Oh, you can back up the music files on this drive attached to Nucleus to your NAS at a time when you aren’t listening to music…

How about if.ypu moved the.file, I hope Roon has the intelligence to replace tracks with other copy.

All your network switch talk does not solve this

And if you believe switch bandwidth is really 1Gb per second, it is sadly mistaken