Transition from Sooloos to Nucleus

Audio Gear Talk Meridian Audio
1

@support @steven_silberman

I did a demo for a Sooloos owner yesterday and he in now considering replacing his Control 15 (which is also working as his Sooloos Core) with a Nucleus and a touch PC.

All his music is stored on a QNAP NAS and I have a couple questions about transition from Sooloos to Roon and Nucleus.

  1. Is it required to do a Sooloos export to FLAC to another storage or can we just add his Sooloos folders as Roon Stores?

  2. The customer is using a Meridian 861 with an ID41 card in the cinema room, Meridian Media Source 600 in the living room and 3 x Meridian Media Source 200 in multi room mode for the rest of the house. Will he be able to run four of these zones in sync as tight (in time) as with Sooloos?

I expect a number of Meridian customers to be interested in replacing old Control 10/15 and Meridan Cores with Nucleus and as soon as I know I can update all the retailers on how to do.

Thanks.

2

I would definitely recommend exporting to FLAC (native) rather than using the old Sooloos library. Roon ought to identify albums with greater accuracy doing it that way.

His Sooloos endpoints (including the Control15) can be run in sync with each other. Sooloos kit cannot be run in sync with RAAT kit though, you can’t mix and match.

3

Depending on how the content was ripped, it may make sense to do the export.

If the files were ripped in Sooloos (Control:PC/Control:15), all the metadata will exist in the Sooloos database only. Roon can sometimes do well with just the raw files, but there won’t be any file tags at all, and it can be a bit messy, particularly with shorter albums, EPs, and singles.

If you export, all the metadata in the Sooloos database is written into the file tags, and Roon will generally do better identifying the content.

On the other hand, if the files were ripped elsewhere (like in dBpoweramp, or by a ripping service) and then imported into Sooloos, the files will be tagged and may work fine in Roon. You can try this if you want, but doing the export is a one-time process that will ensure the best possible identification.

We have seen some “drift” with some of the older Sooloos-branded produts, especially the Control:10, and I know at one point Meridian implemented a feature that simply resynced all zones after each track as a workaround-- basically like quickly pressing pause twice, which had a negative effect on gapless playback, but did ensure that things synced up after each track.

We don’t have that feature in Roon, but the rest of the underlying code is the same. With Meridian branded audio devices I would expect this to be pretty tight, and I regularly link two MS200s at home.

We have a lot of Meridian customers, and have not had complaints on this, but we could absolutely look into this if certain models or configurations were getting out of sync.

4

@mike

Thanks.

  1. We will do a FLAC export from Sooloos then to be on the safe side…
  2. All Meridian Sooloos products in the system are current production, so I suppose that it should sync equally well as with Sooloos then.
5

Hello Mike…

In my case, I don’t have the option of exporting from Sooloos in FLAC. My Meridian Sooloos Ensemble system no longer turns on. Fortunately I have a full back up on my NAS. The backup files are in *.backupdata format, which I am unable to get Roon to recognize.

Based on this thread, the export/FLAC option is best, but may not be mandatory. If that interpretation is correct, how do I go about importing the Sooloos-proprietary files?

I suppose the other option is to find a Sooloos expert who can either get my system to work again, or remove the hard drive and go from there…

Thx,
John

6

I’m relatively new to roon and want to include my sooloos control 15 which serves as the core of the sooloos elements of my system to be watched in Roon Olin order to include tyat music in the library.

I’ve added the storage devices on my media core 600 but don’t know the top level folder names to include in order to monitor the items stored on the control 15.

Anyone know what the path name should be to accomplish this in roon storage settings?

Thanks. Jason

7

I would start your own thread in the support category rather than add to a three year old one.

8

I transitioned from Sooloos to Roon a few years ago. Roon can’t see the Sooloos files directly - you need to export them to a storage device as explained here: