I have avoided posting on this topic because I don’t have anything positive to add.
After today’s little messabout, I think that maybe negative comments can be useful.
Though I am a fully-paid Roonite, I haven’t recommended Roon to anyone because it doesn’t work very well in many of the situations it ought to.
My experience is that it works nearly perfectly when the Core is the endpoint or is directly wired via Ethernet to another Mac running Roon or Roon Bridge. Introduce a network into the mix, and Roon becomes flaky at best and utterly unusable at most; the latter case about 50% of the times I have tried it.
I have three iPhones, an iPad, two Apple TVs, and three Macs on my mixed wired and Apple WiFi network. There’s a HUE hub and a couple of Amazon Dots and Echos. None of these other devices has any problem; turning all of them off doesn’t make any difference when Roon doesn’t feel like playing.
The network is fast. I get speeds of 350-400 Mbps over WiFi to Speedtest. That’s around 45 MBs per second, which is more than enough to deliver an audio file and associated metadata. My music is on a hardware RAID with throughput that can saturate Thunderbolt 2. My Core is the fastest Mac Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Endpoints are wired Airport Expresses and an 8GB Mac Mini 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5—the former should just pass a signal and the latter has enough RAM and processor power to deliver four streams of high-quality HD video at once; it should be able to handle a RAAT stream.
I’m sure there is something I’m doing wrong. I’ll bet there is hardware I could buy that would solve the problems. But that’s not the point. The point is that Roon isn’t a Network Music player that just any old person can use, like iTunes or Swinsian, or even VLC. Unless you’re direct-wired, Roon requires a bunch of screwing around, and nobody I know would put up with that.
Speaking of other tech that work perfectly every single time I try them on this network:
AirPlay
Chromecast
Whatever Amazon uses
Plex
It’s nice to have RAAT and cool information about my music library, and I dig the interface and most of how Roon works. It’s made me very happy. I just wish it worked well enough to recommend.
Update: I got rid of the Aiport network, set up a trio of Orbi RBK50+Satellites. Same problems exist. 