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

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. 

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.

I have never been a Roon user.  I have seen it used.  It appears to help organize large collections and also suggest new music based on listening algorithms.  It also provides liner notes type information on the recordings.
   That was exciting stuff but as with all digital technology it is only a few years before the competition emulates it.  Particularly if one is using a streaming service, the service software has similar functionality.  Roon may still have a niche organizing and integrating a hard drive with music along with the music pulled from the streaming service, so it all resides in one place.  Personally I’m ok with having those files in 2 areas, but I understand the appeal.

  I can’t address the SQ issue from experience but I have seen enough written about potential SQ degradation with Roon that it discouraged me from ever becoming a user.

I was having occasional hiccups while using Roon with my desktop acting as the core so I went with the sonic transporter also mentioned previously. It has been very stable. It’s about half the price of the newer Roon nucleus. FWIW I have it hooked up by Ethernet to a dcs  rossini

 

I have 2 innuos streamers, a zen in the music room and a pulse in the living room (mapped to the zen drive).
the sense app is similar to roon in that it displays online albums of the same artists stored locally, and
offers suggestions for similar artists. Roon is better in some ways, sense is better in others. one hiccup
is when the tablet(android) wakes often the app freezes and needs to be restarted but it always finds it server.