Replacing Roon - What Should I get?

The Roon forum is full of similar reports of instability, many from me.  Of course they attract the "Roon runs flawlessly for me" posts as well. The equivalent of "I can eat onions so why do they bother your stomach?"

One thing that those with "flawless Roon" seem not to address is that there are variables beyond local hardware and network to consider.  The nature of one's library has a lot to say about how Roon acts and when it sucks up all the system resources and grinds itself to instability.  And I firmly believe that local Roon relies very heavily on the Roon network and that various forms of instability and slowness originate from the SAAS part, or at least it's an interaction with local. 

The real problem with Roon is that there isn't really anything else like it.  Once you've configured your gear for it, it's hard to turn back.  

I've been able to mitigate my issues with Roon significantly by using a very powerful machine as a Roon core, in an area where fan noise doesn't matter, running Ubuntu server without anything else on it, with all locally stored files on a drive right in the machine, with at least 32GB of RAM.  Then use very clean and quiet endpoints via wired network. 

Roon still does goofy stuff, including going silent at the end of every few songs while reflecting that it is still playing, playing the same artist every other song in Radio, and occasionally being very slow. But at least with Ubuntu you can see system resource usage and restart or reboot when necessary.

With some of the more common issues, it looks like Roon may be admitting they are a hard fix and is providing some tools to mitigate these problems as well. For example, it looks like they are testing a version that allows metadata updates to be scheduled for off hours. Now, if Roon would just allow a restart from any remote! 

For the work it would take to migrate a heavily manicured library to a different solution, and the fact it wouldn't be as good, I would recommend trying to mitigate Roon's faults with substantially updated hardware.  Also clean your library of unidentified albums if you can. 

Pursue the roon community for answers and upgrade the nucleus and make sure you have a back up.

roon has excellent commentary that’s hard to live without

I think the file manager system is horrifying on roon, it should be a lot better.

Hello,

 Sorry to hear about your trouble. I have had Roon for about 3 years.

luckily for me, I have never had a problem. I am using a Rockna Wavelight Server, this has a Roon Core built in. Maybe thats why I have been lucky?

Andy

@jji666 agreed. 
Roon forum is as useless as an ejection seat on a helicopter. I think there’s a good percentage of posters there who actually don’t have roon and or don’t own systems that can put roon to the test. The ASR minions with their “it’s all 1s and 0s” and “we need a blind test” mindset spread their tentacles there and flooded the forums with nonsense. 
I’ve not seen a single helpful response there other than basic solutions to extremely basic problems in cases where people simply don’t understand how to even use roon. Other than that, good luck 

On a positive note - I hard rebooted my Nucleus One last night and some of the issues are gone for now. Still a but slow to react and execute, and still sonically inferior to jplay (to my ears) but it’s working now. 

I can appreciate the challenges the OP faces having to reboot the system frequently.  It's reassuring to know, though, that there are configurations where Roon works well.

I was also one of those with an early lifetime membership.  Computers are a hobby of mine, and I enjoy administering all kinds of systems in my home IT closet.  Roon core runs happily on my 14-year-old Linux server.  I stream it to various locations with Intel NUC's running Rock, but mostly to my main 2-channel system with a PS Audio Airlens as the streaming endpoint.  It's all controlled from either a Mac laptop or iPad.

My setup works great, but of course it requires a lot of computer experience.  I think for a much simpler system, someone could use either a Mac Mini or a small inexpensive computer running Windows as their Roon core.  I can definitely recommend the Airlens as a good endpoint; I stream DSD256 and 24/352 data with no issues.

Roon isn't perfect.  I wish the search mechanism were a little more consistent in its results, for instance.  But it does some things brilliantly, and is available in so many different platforms. 

I'm not familiar with the Roon nucleus, so I really can't speak to that.  There are ways, though, of making it work with basic computer hardware, and you can choose a platform that you're most comfortable with.  It might be worth investing a little time to explore this option.

Michael