Roon: everything you need to know


There have been a number of threads started, and hundreds of posts, asking 101 level questions about Roon.

This overview from WHAT Hi*Fi? is an excellent one. I believe this may / will be valuable to those exploring, considering, and/or starting out with Roon.

https://www.whathifi.com/advice/roon-everything-you-need-to-know

I respectfully request posts in this thread focus On Learning about Roon.

There are (other) numerous, better suited threads where opinions (both pro and con) can be expressed, shared and discussed. Thanks!
david_ten
+1 @spinaker01 

Seems like most of the overhead is in the library management functions

My Innuos Zen 3, pretty modest really, has no problem as my Roon core and running DSP functions with all files upsampled to 128DSD. Not the most powerful server to be sure.
Wow you need 128GB or 64 GB of ram to run roon? I never realized it was that memory intense.

<< cough cough >> bs.

The memory requirements are because they expect you to have 100K or more songs, and they like to keep a lot of that buffered. I have a paltry 7K and I’m running it on a Linux box, with an A10 7850 and 16 GB. I could do it with far less.
Clarifying and Correcting, since I wasn't AT ALL clear in my earlier post (see below):

My recommendation is to push for 128GB over 64GB

I was referring to the SSD and not RAM.

Roon's recommendation for RAM is 4GB RAM, 8GB RAM max.

Here is their guidance on the SSD (Note: Not for storage)

  • Make sure you are installing to an SSD and not a spinning disk. The NUCs we recommend have an M.2 SSD slot for just this purpose. ROCK's installer will use a tiny bit of it for the operating system, and the rest for the Roon Database.
  • The SSD can not be used for music content. If you want music content in this device, use another disk (see below about "internal storage")
  • The SSD can be 64GB or larger -- note that larger SSDs tend to be faster due to how the chips are laid out (after 256GB, it doesn't matter... for now). It is extremely rare you will need more than 128GB of storage on this SSD. ROCK will not use it.