Roon….The Gordon Knot of concierge musical services?


Not sure what my options are going forward.  Had my Roon server on a windows desktop and bridged to both my I pad and my I phone. Everything worked OK for the most part but had to uninstall and reinstall every once in a while . I updated my desktop to a new unit with Windows 11 and after some wrangling got both my I phone and my I pad to work.  Then, first the iPad lost the core and then the I phone lost it.  I have read and tried everything I can find about permissions, firewalls, bridges etc.

So here are a number of questions:

Throw good money after bad and buy a NUCLEUS?   I currently am using a LUMIN D_2 which I have been happy with.   I was smart enough not to buy a lifetime membership to Roon so is there another music concierge service that links up to Apple products more reliably?  Would the nucleus fix these problems or just create more “R.R.A.”? (Roon Related Animosity!)

OR…….Should I chuck the I pad and switch to Microsoft Surface tablet?  That still wouldn’t fix my lack of connectivity to my I phone.

I have been running Tidal directly to my LUMIN which works but I really miss the concierge look and apps of Roon.  Just have had it with them technically because they are doing more to ruin my musical experience rather then enhance it.

Lastly, would love to connect with any true budding Audiophiles in S.W. Michigan!
Particularly tech savvy ones.

 

Thanks in advance for any help or guidance here.

 

 

katieb

For the record, I think Roon is the bees knees and the $800 some lifetime cost is very reasonable for a component that does what it does. I went for it when my trial ended. It is music Nirvana for audio people. Especially classical music lovers. The user experience is wonderful. It’s a very well thought out service. Also the steaming engine built into it is very good and can deliver top notch sound with many many devices. Simply wonderful! Maybe a bit complicated but worth getting a handle on

Just run it on a suitable platform with a good network and internet connection and all should be good. Gotta do it right. There are many ways to do it wrong.

PM me if I might be able to help sort through it. 

I have Roon for free! I mean, I paid for their Lifetime subscription over five years ago when it was $499, and has already paid for itself. Do the math. By far the best purchase I have ever made in this hobby. I wouldn’t use anything else, nothing comes close.

 

It works flawlessly, and never had any issues I did not solve very fast. And I have had all sorts of Cores over the years, computers, NUC, Nucleus, SonicTransport, etc. I have settled on my current Innuos ZENith MK3

Roon is pretty cpu and resource intensive in general.

For the core, it kind of varies. While yes, new DB changes can consume the CPU, what can consume it more is DSD to PCM or intense DSP activities. Mind you, the Roon app does ALL of the DSD/conversion/streaming from the core, so Roon is concerned about the core bogging down with multiple devices being fed at once, but one device doing modest DSP / sample rate conversion is really not CPU intensive at all and practically any NUC from the past 5 years should be good enough.

I’ve been running my core on a 10 year old APU (A10 7500? I thinik. I forgot) for 3-4 years now and never had an issue with CPU power, I’m sure anything you buy now which can boot Linux/Ubuntu will work today.

On the other hand, you can use a Pi4 as a streamer with no issues.