Windows processing requirements

I’ve got a music library of about 450,000 songs. About 3000 hi resolution albums and the rest CD quality ALAC and FLAC files.

Will a new windows based laptop with an i7 processor and 12 GB RAM be enough horsepower to run ROON core?

At most two systems playing the music and probably almost nothing else but the odd internet searching running at the same time.

Thanks!

Larry

You’re not specifying what generation i7, but your system looks more than capable to run the core to me. Before moving to an older i7 Windows laptop, I used a Lenovo tiny PC with a Celeron processor and 4GB RAM for a while with two zones and had no performance issues.

How big is your library?

Looks like 11 th generation

About 16K tracks, 350GB, most of them CD FLAC. Yours is quite bigger, but your machine should be able to handle it. If not, I would think it’s a Roon limitation rather than hardware.

I’d say yes, but I think it is more important to have core and endpoints connected by ethernet, and core computer doing nothing else than running Roon. For your library size I’d say connecting a big drive to your core by USB would be best, but others with bigger libraries than mine are better qualified to comment.

I assume it has a SSD drive. Make sure the Roon database is installed there.

From Roon

Largest Libraries

If you have over 250K+ tracks in your library, consider us impressed! You’re among the top .01% of Roon users, and you have a library most of us could only dream of.

With libraries this large, we expect the right hardware will work, but it’s definitely not something that we test with in-house. Your best bet will be to get a beefy Roon OS or Windows setup (we do not recommend standard Linux or macOS Cores for this) with a fast new CPU and plenty of RAM.

12gb would be light for that size library I would think, the database is resident in memory and may not fit or be very slow as memory is swapped out.

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I have a 14Tb and a 5Tb external drive which hold the music. - about 15.5 tb total

Nothing else to speak of will be on the PC or the hard drives. I may try a subscription to Tidal or Qubuz, but the first step is get this behemoth more manageable and approachable.

Once I get it all sorted by Roon there will be a lot of duplication that I can eliminate.

How many copies of Hotel California and Kind of Blue does a person need?

The PC will be connected by Ethernet.

More sonhs than you have but you can see the memory scaling

Yes, the PC has a 512gb SSD.

Not sure about the external drives. I suspect they are HDD.

I am pushing the limits of my technical knowledge and abilities!

This may work but it’s way below Roon’s stated minimum hardware

Handling 450k tracks will require i7 and a lot of RAM, mine is i7. 7700 with 16gb RAM for 180k tracks , normal operation takes 3 gb of the 16

I’m going to try it and if it either slow or doesn’t work I will upgrade the RAM to 32gb or more of I can.

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.

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Just curios: If you look in the Task Manager, how much memory is the Roon core process using?

Sometimes in the mid 90%. You definitely need a lot of RAM to operate Roon with a library this big. I don’t use the computer for anything else but managing the nearly 20 TBs of music files.

Interestingly to me, I bought a new laptop thinking that 12 gigs of RAM would be enough. When it was a bit clunky I added 4 more gigs and that certainly helped, but when Roon is performing multiple functions, it will use mid 90% of the 16 gigs of RAM.

I can’t add any more RAM to my computer, but it would be interesting to know how much RAM would be enough for Roon to use a more reasonable percentage of it.

There have been bigger libraries reported but not many , you are definitely in the top 1%

If the laptop is coping that says a lot !!

You didn’t add the the statistic 95 years of 24/7 listening :smiling_imp: :rofl:

I’ve got 4800 albums and over 56,000 tracks working fine on a 3.7 GHz i3 with 16 GB RAM.

Kinda silly and kinda fun.

I don’t know where to find the total music time stat but my rough calculation is about 1300 days 24/7.

Obviously there is a lot of music in the library I haven’t heard, but the radio function really helps with that.