What does Roon offer? I'm coming from the Meridian world

All seems very exciting. Especially the relation oriented structure of the metadata. In the past we have build such systems for representing and browsing medical knowledge.
I can’t imagine that Meridian will not have Roon in their Sooloos upgrade path. We have to see how the release of Roon and the release of Sooloos v3 upgrade are synchronised.
So far I am very happy with the clear statements of the Roon people.

Pieter

I’m still a bit confused here. I have a MD600 and multiple MS200s. I also have a MacMini that I could use as a server. Can I use my MD600 as storage in a Roon System? Can my MS200s play back from Roon? I also have numerous Squeezebox Touch and Sonos units. Can these also work with Roon?

Can I use my MD600 as storage in a Roon System?

Yes.

Can my MS200s play back from Roon?

Yes.

I also have numerous Squeezebox Touch and Sonos units. Can these also work with Roon?

Roon will not support these devices at launch, but it’s something we plan to work on soon after.

Surely Brian, it would be wise to add a few provisos here to using Sooloos Stores in a Roon environment??

e.g. Yes, an MD600 can be used for Storage in a Roon system, as long as

a) the Sooloos store was populated with CD’s ripped OUTSIDE of Sooloos, using dbPA or similar [to ensure that the Track ID3 Tags were populated]

b) relying on the SQL data storage methods employed in Sooloos MAY lead to more errors in Album Identification than if a more typical Artist / Album / Track structure is used

I realize that these issues are touched on elsewhere here, but it may be worthwhile mentioning them here again…so that people can make appropriate decisions about what Hardware they may use with their Roon systems in the future

@ronnie_hurley1, you are correct, from Roon’s perspective the MD600 behaves just like any other NAS. There is no special support for reading Meridian databases or interacting with the System Core software that comes with the box.

It’s possible to watch the Sooloos databases in a “no touch” mode, simply because the databases already name the files track01, … and group them into directories reasonably. Some disc sets will fail to clump properly into albums, and some albums will require manual assistance to identify, but it is a reasonable low-effort/low-risk way to try out the software. You’d be surprised how many albums Roon can correctly identify even without tags.

For the best experience, you’ll want to export the content from a Meridian system using the lossless export feature, which produces nicely tagged files in a human readable directory structure. Then import that into Roon.

Also, there’s no SQL in Sooloos. No idea where that came from :smile:

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@briand and @ronnie_hurley1 have answered this already, but I want to make sure you got this right.

  1. The MD600 and all the other Sooloos storage devices export a SMB share, which can be accessed for read or write, by any program.
  2. Roon can read or write to the MD600’s shared storage.
  3. Roon will look at the audio files on that shared storage, as if it was any other NAS, or even a USB harddrive connected locally. It does not treat it in any “special” way.
  4. After ripping from CD, Sooloos doesn’t seem to touch the files, so all the tag editing or identifications that may have occurred is not written to the music files, but instead held in proprietary files. Roon does not look at these Meridian/Sooloos proprietary files.
  5. Any music you have on that MD600 will go through a re-identification process, just like any new music you introduce to Roon. In this case, Roon is able to get a very high hit rate on the content here, because of the album based organization of the files.
  6. Unfortunately, your manually groomed metadata in Sooloos is held in Meridian proprietary files, which Roon does not look at. However, @brian posted a great topic here on why this is much less important than you might be inclined to believe.
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@danny,

Thanks for your support with the very informative answers.
I am coming from the Meridian word as well.
A few dilettantish questions for you please.
Just wanted to confirm if a high spec mac and a MS200 going straight into DSP Speakers will be enough to run the Roon-based system (no Meridian-produced core).
And in theory this MAC does not have to be plugged into Ethernet but a decent 5GHz WiFi connection would be sufficient? I guess it should given it is higher than the broadband speed anyway? As I am thinking of using my very top spec MacBookPro both as a server (has got 1TB SSD, but planning to mostly stream from Tidal anyway) and a controller with a MS200 as an endpoint.

[quote=“Dmitry, post:34, topic:93”]
Just wanted to confirm if a high spec mac and a MS200 going straight into DSP Speakers will be enough to run the Roon-based system (no Meridian-produced core).
[/quote] You’ll need somewhere to store your music (on that Mac?), but otherwise, yes!

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thanks! I am really thrilled by what the Roon team is about to offer.
A great job being at the front of the newest trends in how people listen to music since 2007 until nowadays and worth a lot of respect.

Sorry if this has been covered, but would the Roon software allow me to stream from a Windows-based NAS to an 861\ID41 with control from an Android\iPad device?

Yes. iPad release will not be in May, but I believe everything else you just asked for will.

Thanks. What about Meridian processor etc volume control from Android\iPad apps? Is that an option?

Meridian volume and zone switch off is supported in all versions.

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Thanks. This could well provide the successor to my Transporter. I look forward to trying it out.

I moved 3 posts to a new topic: UPnP quality

Hi Danny,

Wondering if you could consolidate some of the info in this thread and post a step by step guide to setting up Roon for users with an existing Meridian Sooloos system? For example, I have an MD600 core/store and an MS600 endpoint. Thanks!

This is a helpful summary. Thanks!

@kerry, there is only two steps right now: Disable your Meridian Core and add the Meridian Store’s music folder share to Roon.

I don’t want to explore more tweaks at the moment because Meridian ensures us all that things are getting better, so even the disabling Core will not be needed.

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Thanks Danny. Easy! Is there a benefit to exporting files from my MD600 to an external hard disk first or is it ok to just have Roon read them off of the MD600? About 3/4 of the CDs were ripped through dBpoweramp or were from HDTracks. Only about 1/4 were ripped with the control PC software.

The MD600’s internal db format is a bit strange, and if you ripped cds, they lack tags completely. sometimes we can still identify them, but not always.

Export to another location will ensure that they have clean tags.

There is work planned to do this Meridian integration a bit better, both on our end and on meridian’s end.

I personally would export now, and then you’d have clean stuff to work with immediately. If you want your Meridian endpoints to work w/ Roon, you have to run off the Meridian Sooloos Core until they fix a bug on their end.