Roon Discussion

No latency that I’ve noticed, but I only have < 2k tracks right now. Tidal was the biggest improvement in latency - it’s almost instantaneous, and WAY faster than using the Tidal app from my laptop.

 

I had no idea about that feature. That kicks ass...I may sell my NAS and just plug in my portable USB spinner!!

 

NAS slows down the initial scanning of the music (because no NUCs have 10G ethernet, and the latency is higher) and sometimes if nothing has been using the NAS and the disks spun down it'll take 10s or so for the music to start the first time.

If you set the spin-down times to something sane it's not really an issue, I store my music in an external hdd connected to the NUC to have 2 physical locations for my music because once burned, twice shy.

I've lost my music library before due to not having a backup and I won't risk it again.

 

Yeah if I were to go to a USB drive, I would just duplicate the music drive from my laptop as a backup.

Offsite/cloud backup is best of course - I really should look into that at some point. Cloud storage assume I pretty cheap these days, but haven’t looked around.

 

Unfortunately I only have fttc here in the countryside so my upload is far too slow for cloud backups to complete in reasonable times.

 

Btw, another cool feature...to add music to your roon library, you can simply drag it to the application window itself...even on a remote.

 

I have decided to embrace this Roon thing. I did the trial using my Macbook Pro for the core and an Auralic Aries Mini for the endpoint.



Tunes were Tidal and FLAC's on my Synology RS815 NAS. No latency that I can determine.



To permanentize the setup, I built an Intel NUC7i7BNH and loaded the Roon Rock software on it.



I bought a DigiOne Signature for the endpoint to see how it plays against the Auralic. Running BNC S/P-DIF to the GumbFreya.



I'm finding the DigiOne to be better at everything than the Auralic. I've tried the Digi on ethernet and WiFi and find the ethernet to be better. Since I have optical ports on my main switch, I am going to test an optical ethernet link to it to see if the isolation does anything for the sound. If so, I'll fish in a line to a media converter at the Digi. I'm using 18650 Li batteries to power the clean side of the Digi. They are able to run a week at 24/7 power. May do something different later (LPS, etc.) but swapping four batteries between the Digi and the charger every week isn't much of a hassle. With the Digi, even if you opt for the "Plug-n-Play" it is more like "Plug-n-PRAY". There is no way out of immersing yourself in the DietPi OS. Allo technical support is a total vacuum of suckness. I am glad I made a backup of the disk image because I bricked the damned thing trying to get it configured like I wanted it. Otherwise, I'd have been in deep doo.

The system is very satisfying at the moment. I'm going to hold it here for a while before considering any further tweaks (such as HQPlayer) or substituting Qobuz for Tidal. Upsampling in Roon doesn't seem to bring much, if anything, over what the Gungnir Multibit can do with straight Redbook.

 

I played around with Dietpi and found it was far easier to just start with Ropieee (https://www.ropieee.org) easy to config and I've had two endpoints running with no issues for over a month.

 

Yep. I thought I was avoiding a learning curve with the P-n-P item, but it turned out not so and I would agree with you on rolling your own. I don't know enough to say what Ropieee brings that DietPi lacks. DietPi is working fine for me.

 

DietPi was a PITA compared to Ropieee, for me at least. But I'm mostly an idiot.

 

My understanding was that Ropieee can't (yet?) do NAA, and since I expected to at least audition HQPlayer, I wanted the capability for that. The PITA for DietPi is about over now that I know a little bit about it and have saved a couple of different disk images as re-start points for when I run out of luck.

 

With a day off coinciding with my wife at work and both kids at school, and knowing I had a little time to myself tinker/configure.... I finally took the plunge and downloaded Roon.

So far I'm really impressed/pleased. It's doing almost everything I'd want it to do as well as (or better than) I'd hoped. I could go on and on with all things I'm really liking, but I gotta get up the hill to get my son off the school bus in a couple minutes, so (for now) I'll just cut to the one thing that ISN'T working the way I'd hoped.

I've got my phone (Pixel 2) plugged into my headphone DAC/AMP (schiit jot w/ Built-In D/S DAC) via USB (Audioquest Forest A-to-C), and to my surprise, the "standard Roon configuration" is downsampling all 24/96 content to 16/48 when my phone is the target playback device. I didn't anticipate that. If I go into Settings and tell it to use a Max Sample Rate (PCM) of 96 kHz (rather than 48) and a Max Bit Per Sample (PCM) of 24 (rather than 16), playback is still downsampling all 24/96 to 16/48... Is this normal? Should I have expected this? Is this a limitation of my hardware (pixel phone), even when not decoding within the phone but rather outputting via USB, that I was unaware of until I installed Roon and could see my signal path? Or am I simply struggling (user error) with getting Roon configured properly for my purposes?

 

Yes. Android audio stack is only concerned with maximum campatibilty, easy development, and predictable cpu loads.

Unless you do evil hacks in the app or load custom android audio code, or both, absolutely everything going out that is a sound goes through the 16/48 mixer.

Android DAPs run custom audio stacks, and on stock android, as far as I know, only neutron player can bypass the mixer - and then not on all devices, though on most.

I believe the TOTL LG phones can also do other output formats in some cases, but they're the exception.

As far as I know, there is no way to retrofit decent audio code onto an android build, as all plugins in the usual methods (magisk, exposed, etc) not only require root but are wholly concerned with putting even *more* extraneous processing in the audio stack, as the focus is only to massage it to sound OK out of the built-in speakers.

 

Thank you for the detailed/thorough response! I learned something there. Appreciate it.

 

USB Audio Player Pro HiRes Driver does it on certain devices as well, here is the list: http://extreamsd.com/index.php/hires-audio-driver.
For example on my DP-X1, the UAPP HiRes driver bypasses Android resampling and works directly with dual ESS Sabre ES90182KM.
They have a pretty convoluted test you can run on your device if it's not on the list and check if it works. My Onkyo DP-X1 is on the list and the test worked, it did not on my phone HTC-10.

 

After my first full/extended weekend with Roon, I'm really taken by it. Not only does it do everything that I'd hoped it would do (allow me to downsample all 88.2 kHz and 96 kHz content to 44.1 and 48 before sending to any/all of my Chromecast Audios and Groupings of CCAs; provide better DSP EQ capabilities; integrate my personal library with Qobuz; etc), but it does a whole bunch of other things as well that I didn't even know I wanted/needed. It is the simplest software I've come across, yet, for managing/fixing/correcting metadata that wasn't scraped properly the first time around. The ease with which it allowed me to sort out errors with Compilation Albums and 2-CD-sets was a breath of fresh air. And I loved the Audeze presets too.

That said, I had one thing "go wrong" for me on Sunday, and I was wondering if anybody in the community could shed some light on what caused it and how I can avoid it happening again:
- In the morning I ran the "backup" feature, and stored a backup on an external USB drive.
- I also rebooted my Server PC a few times while updating nVidia GeForce drivers.

Later in the day, for unknown reasons:
- All of my Chromecast Audio "groupings," which I had successfully enabled on Friday and used throughout the day on Saturday, had Disabled themselves and had to be manually re-enabled.
- My "custom sample rate conversions" (downsampling all 88.2 and 96 khz content to 44.1 and 48) for the disabled CCA groupings had all been reset to their default.
- My "custom sample rate conversions" for the individual chromecast audios themselves (which had not been disabled, unlike the groupings) had also been reset to defaults.
- My Audeze preset for my Schiit Jotenheim had been forgotten as well; I had to manually re-enable and re-select that I have the LCD-2C from the list.


Is this a quirk that happens after you run a Backup? Do these presets undo themselves after a certain period of time, regardless of Backup? Did I commit some sort of unknown user error (don't even realize what I did...)? Is this some sort of known "bug" with the current version of Roon that others are also experiencing?

 

I've never had settings get lost, and I have autobackups set to run daily during lunch.

 

Hi @psuKinger I've been using Roon for almost a year now. I have local backups configured as well as DropBox backups. I have not experienced the issues you have described. With that said, I have a dedicated server setup as the Roon Core. I then use my other devices as endpoints.

I suspect the NVIDIA Driver Update may have caused your issues. With my current 2080 there is a NVIDIA High Definition Audio Device and NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device configured under 'Sound, video and game controllers" within Device Manager.

During NVIDIA driver updates those two devices may get upgraded. I think what's happening is the audio device/stack gets re-enumerated as part of the process thus causing some of the audio devices to change position. In this case any previously configured local device would appear as new devices to Roon as the device addresses have changed.

I have note seen this behavior with any of the network endpoints I run.

 

Roon seems very interesting from a music point of view, especially the "recommended" sections. Discovering new music is much more fun the buying gear these days.
I liste to a lot of music at work, so am interested to know if I can stream from my home-network to work via Roon, without jumping thought hoops? It seems the most functionality is build around the local network usage of it. I have no interest in Tidal or Qubuz, so I guess it is pretty expensive for just playing local files , unless it offers some form of remote access.

 

I don't know about remote access, but I use Roon just for playing local files, and I think it's worth every penny.

Cheers,
Jeff.