Roon - Non existing support

[Joemoonit]

Last (?) report on this. After the last reboot there was no way to have Roon back in working condition. So I took out a Mini PC I had in a drawer. It's a Minis Forum Z83-F with Intel Atom x5 CPU 1.44 GHz, 64 GB and 4GB RAM, windows 10. It, it's my now Roon core and I must say it does it very well. I'm using an external 500GB HD as storage and everything's fine. I read about Roon Rock but I'm not sure it will be a good idea to touch something that works, what do you think?

 

[PHD]

Roon has no technical support, just their useless community support. I also bought a lifetime license and later found out that I cannot even load my entire music to a single queue for random playback. Lesson learned. I'm now using Jriver instead.

 

[muslhead]

Roon has no technical support, just their useless community support. I also bought a lifetime license and later found out that I cannot even load my entire music to a single queue for random playback. Lesson learned. I'm now using Jriver instead.

Like Roon, jriver support is non existant. Left to the community which i feel is less knowledgable than Roon's. Sure, Jriver's interface is not as slick but has the same (for my needs) functionality and more (video). The kicker for Jriver is its a one time license fee of less than $30. If you want future updates, they too will cost you. But in this case its another reasonable $30 (or less). I update every 2-3 years. Most recently not as often as their upgrades are focused on the video side rather than audio.
I appreciate the fact i dont need an internet connection to access and play my own library.

 

[Moderate Dionysianism]

Last (?) report on this. After the last reboot there was no way to have Roon back in working condition. So I took out a Mini PC I had in a drawer. It's a Minis Forum Z83-F with Intel Atom x5 CPU 1.44 GHz, 64 GB and 4GB RAM, windows 10. It, it's my now Roon core and I must say it does it very well. I'm using an external 500GB HD as storage and everything's fine. I read about Roon Rock but I'm not sure it will be a good idea to touch something that works, what do you think?

I'd say if it's stable and doesn't glitch/run out of memory then stick with it Here's a recent thread discussing music servers. It seems that, unless you're hosting a ginormous music library 24/7/365 and/or managing multiple endpoints, a lightweight NUC should do just fine.

 

[ahofer]

I've only used ROCK. The auto-updating, rapid boot, etc. is nice, and I really haven't had any functional problems at all.

 

[direwolf08]

I did a short trial of Roon a while back and decided to pass. I just did not see the value for my use case, but I do understand why people like it.

I don't really have a stake in this discussion. That said, it is pretty shocking to me that a company that charges $150/year or $830 for a lifetime license will not provide white glove support for their product, and then have the gall to heavily moderate the forum where people are trying to get those problems solved. Glad I never bought in!

 

[Keith_W]

Like Roon, jriver support is non existant. Left to the community which i feel is less knowledgable than Roon's.

Not really, the JRiver forums are full of JRMC staff including JimH, the founder of JRMC. He personally answers questions on the future direction of JRiver. I wouldn't say their community is not knowledgeable either, as long as the problem is with JRiver, they will be able to solve it.

 

[JoachimStrobel]

Do not blame Roon too much. They want to sell you a repackaged 300€ box as Nucleus for 1000€ surcharge. That will work and have support. I guess their software-only offering will be removed some day. So be happy to hack their strategy and do not make your setup too complicated (no HDMI out), use a cheap PC and stream direct or via a raspi(equivalent).

 

[Billy Budapest]

Bring back local search / offline functionality for offline Roon Core [restored with Build 1365]

As quoted from many fellow Roon users: According to Danny: Most Roon users would prefer to have offline capabilities than having a slightly better search engine. Please bring this feature back in some capacity.

community.roonlabs.com

Has this been re-implemented yet? I am a lifetime Roon subscriber for playing my locally-stored hi-res files but truthfully after Apple Music introduced lossless hi-res playback, that is almost exclusively what I have been playing. My Roon software and hardware it resides on just isn’t getting much use these days.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

They want to sell you a repackaged 300€ box as Nucleus for 1000€ surcharge.

Not quite. They sell fanless boxes. Not as easy as putting a noisy NUC in your living room. Also the markup is far from what is common in the high end audio field. You are (literaly) free to install their flavour of linux on a NUC they specify.

 

[Billy Budapest]

Not quite. They sell fanless boxes. Not as easy as putting a noisy NUC in your living room. Also the markup is far from what is common in the high end audio field. You are (literaly) free to install their flavour of linux on a NUC they specify.

If you have a QNAP, Synology, or Asustor NAS, you can do away with using a NUC or other PC entirely and instead run Roon Server directly on the NAS.

 

[Snoopy]

If you have a QNAP, Synology, or Asustor NAS, you can do away with using a NUC or other PC entirely and instead run Roon Server directly on the NAS.

I'm running roon on a M1 MacBook to that is always on with the display closed anyway.
Can't say I ever had a more reliable machine than this MacBook. Only time I ever need to reboot it is when there is update.

Works flawlessly with roon. Never had the roon app crash or require reboots.

Even upsampling to DSD512 while doing all kinds of EQ and convolution filters with multiple zones is no issue.

All while it still is used as desktop computer for some office stuff.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

If you have a QNAP, Synology, or Asustor NAS, you can do away with using a NUC or other PC entirely and instead run Roon Server directly on the NAS.

This will depend on library size. Does not work for me.

 

[Billy Budapest]

This will depend on library size. Does not work for me.

Or how much RAM your NAS has. I run Roon on my Asustor NAS and everything works perfectly. No need for a NUC, ROCK, dedicated computer, or whatever Roon’s own branded NUCs are called.

 

[JLGF1]

The kicker for Jriver is its a one time license fee of less than $30.

Seems like the $30 JRiver price is history?

 

[Joachim Herbert]

Or how much RAM your NAS has.

Size really matters in this case. How large is your library? Also, Asustore comes in many different flavours.

 

[Billy Budapest]

Size really matters in this case. How large is your library? Also, Asustore comes in many different flavours.

I haven’t counted how many tracks but it is a decent size. I don’t remember what model the Asustor is, but it was a bare bones x86 unit sold without drives. I populated it with three hard drives (two for RAID, one for weekly backup) and an SSD for the Roon database—in other words, I followed Roon’s suggestions.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

I haven’t counted how many tracks but it is a decent size.

That tells us nothing about the size other than that it suits you.

 

[Billy Budapest]

That tells us nothing about the size other than that it suits you.

That’s true, but it also tells you that I haven’t counted the size, or looked up how many tracks. I can do that, though.

 

[Billy Budapest]

@Kal Rubinson
@Joachim Gerhard

OK, I just looked at my Roon library:

315 artists, 1386 albums, 26113 tracks. I have no idea if that is considered a small, medium, or large Roon library.