I agree with running Roon via a dedicated box with Roon ROCK installed as the OS. While Roon “can” run from Windows and MacOS, I’ve found it’s much more stable on a separate Rock OS appliance.
I'm running Roon just fine of a M1 MacBook Air that sits on my desktop. External music library on a thunderbolt 4 Nvme enclosure, connected to a thunderbolt 4 hub. MacBook is connected with LAN. (Belkin thunderbolt).
DSD512 upsampling, convolution filters, PEQ etc all no problem even with 2 Zones.
All that while doing stuff on the MacBook as well.
A rock core is obviously nice because it's just running but it's really not necessary anymore.
I have that MacBook sometimes up for weeks , and roon is always open in the background. (You can run roon server without the GUI too).
I would only run a roon rock if I needed a system with lots of Ram for a massive library.
But I'm sitting at 800gb of local files and there is no difference in performance versus no local files.
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Roon is a amazing software, but I noticed most people don't even use half the features.
Just don't complain in the roon forum, don't post facts about their partners (hardware issues, mqa scam etc).
I got already suspended for nothing that wouldn't even end up in a friendly warning on other forums.