My new laptop arrived yesterday.
It’s a Dell Inspiron 15 3000 with an 11th generation i7 processor, 512 SDD, and 12 GBs of RAM.
I set it up, including loading windows 11, plugged in my two big remote hard drives, plugged in my not-off-the shelf DAC, and loaded Roon, making the PC the Roon Core.
I pointed Roon at the libraries and let it loose.
By the time I went to bed Roon had been working for about 8 hours, it had identified about 25,000 albums, and was starting to slow down a bit.
Meanwhile I had been playing tracks, looking through the features, set up my I phone remote, etc.
I had already noticed that the sound quality of the playback was cleaner and more dynamic than pre-Roon through my previous relic PC.
When I got up this morning the screen was dark. Roon had closed. I feared the worst.
I opened up Roon and it took a couple of minutes to load. I thought it might not, but it did open.
My libraries had been so disorganized, in a wide variety of formats, with the lowest definition being 16/44 files, and I hadn’t been able to get a good read on how many files, or how many duplications, there actually are.
I hadn’t found good software to coordinate it. I’d been using Music Bee, but it lumped multiple versions into one playback file; there would be, for example, 4 versions of track 1, then 4 versions of track 2, etc.
This morning Roon told me it located 11142 artists, 29961 albums, 397261 tracks, and 980 composers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, those files are about 15.5TBs of data.
Long story short, Roon is working great right now. I did try to change a setting on the PC to the bit rate output to my DAC and it froze, but I reloaded Roon (again took a couple of minutes) and it started playing as soon as it was loaded.
The phone remote is working great, Roon is working great, and I’m starting to dig in!
Once the database is loaded it responds almost instantly, both on the PC core and on my phone.
So at this early stage I will say that the i7/12gb RAM is enough horsepower and Roon is giving me completely organized and data rich, virtually immediate access to almost 400,000 tracks.
I have so much more information than yesterday at this time. It’s like having the most knowledgeable librarian with access to an advanced research tool to curate all this music.
I realize I’m only one day in but Roon is a total game changer to my listening experience.