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Replacing Roon - What Should I get?

I'm tired of Roon having brain farts.  I have an original Roon Nucleus and have updated and augmented the Memory.  This helped for a bit.  But now, I keep having to reboot the darn thing.

It's not my network.  I have checked it out and everything in the house works fine.

Here is the setup.  A direct fiber optic link goes to the Router.  Then ethernet to Roon from the Router.  This way I get Roon to talk with the setup upstairs.  I have an 35 foot ethernet cable that runs through the walls directly from the router into my dCS Lina.

I want to replace the Roon.  I am thinking about an Innuos Stream.  Just need a streamer that can hold Roon/Tidal.  Don't need a DAC as the dCS does that quite well.  I have a SSD in the Nucleus that holds a ton of my music that I want to move over.

Thoughts on what to replace the Roon with?  Innuos (Stream) always get bandied about.  I hear about Arender as well. I don't want to get an updated Roon.

I also wonder about deleting and reinstalling the Roon App on my iPads.

Thanks in Advance

pgaulke60
mapman's avatar
mapman
23,602 posts
 

@pgaulke60 I also had that issue occur quite often of late.  I resolved by removing other apps installed on the PC that were contending with the Raat server component of Roon core for resources.  So the key to keeping it minimal appears to be to allow the Roon server to run efficiently and not be constrained.  Also possible the extent of the problem might vary using different devices as Roon endpoints. 

wsrrsw's avatar
wsrrsw
1,477 posts
 

Have you tried Roon labs community? Often a real Roon employee helps. Secound vote for a Grimm. MU1 needs a DAC MU2 is an sll in one. 

carousel's avatar
carousel
31 posts
 

Is the dCS Lina in your main system and you have something else upstairs? Do you want access to the same SSD of music files both upstairs and downstairs? If yes, then you need that library on the network. Just checking online, this looks totally doable with Innuos.

 

Do NOT assume though that you can pop the SSD out of the ROCK and use it elsewhere. Get a second SSD… maybe a portable USB one like from Samsung… and download all the tunes from the ROCK over the network.

 

You could then test just using the dCS app with the USB SSD attached to the Lina to see if that works for you… just with the dCS. If you are OK just to have streaming upstairs, then this might do.

rbstehno
1,631 posts
 

If you run Roon rock on anything, the OS doesn’t give you the thousands of commands in Linux that you would normally use to debug/troubleshoot the system. Roon took all of these commands out to save space and cycles. If you have a problem you are guessing on what it is and you resort to reboots.

I have ran Roon for many years on real OS’s like Mac OSX and Linux with no problems. I suggest running Roon on a real computer (Mac or Linux) and see if you have the same issues. 
 

You might have outgrown your hardware with your music files. I have around 200k of music tracks and have Roon upsample everything to DSD256 (which takes more processing power from the computer) and never misses a beat. 
 

Roon sounded the best in native mode (no upsampling) running on Linux with 6 cores and 64G of memory but running Qobuz Connect directly to the streamer sounded better but the interface isn’t that good and no access to my local ripped music. Since my dac can handle dsd256 input thru i2s, I went back to running Roon on a M1 Mac and turned on upsampling to dsd256. This sounds better than QC directly. 

jhnnrrs
144 posts
 

Raspberry Pi 5 running Volumio, all music files on a 4TB SSD drive attached to my network router, native Qobuz and Tidal integration as well as Qobuz connect.  Done.

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