Roon Discussion

The Roon library is a layer that tries to unify local music and streaming services (Tidal and Qobuz). For better and worse, they chose albums as the main object for the library, most likely because the original Roon was designed for local music, and connection to streaming services was an add-on. Everything else — artists, composers, compositions, labels — is derived/linked from album objects. With the consequences that you decry: artists, composers, compositions that do not appear on at least one album in your library don't exist as far as Roon is concerned. I agree, not good for your intended uses.

Add on: Roon seems designed for "old time" record collectors more than for "new style" music explorers. Its structure makes fairly good sense for someone (like me) who started by ripping a cherished CD collection, and zero sense for someone who came into music exploration from streaming. Showing my age

 

Oh thanks for clarifying the issue. I can't add an entire artist to my library either. You need to add an album. I guess I don't consume music the same way as you so have not run into this before.

 

I'm glad it works so well for all of you, I'm jealous! I was hoping things had changed or I could just use it for music discovery. Oh well. I'll have to wait for Apple Music AI

 

Like @RestoredSparda, I'm also a qobuz guy and can't speak to how Tidal works with Roon... but I assume operation is identical both services.

LIke @rlow , I can favorite an artist once they appear anywhere in my library. To me this makes sense, if I have a favorite artist then I probably have some of their albums in my library.

Frankly, I never noticed this before, because I have probably never tried to favorite an artist before adding at least one of their albums before. I generally listen to the album, like it, add it to my library, then go explore more from the artist. If I start liking a bunch of their stuff/add to my library, then they become a favorite artist.

As for albums, the only option for an album is to add it to my library, which then allows me to favorite the album. To me, this also makes sense, as I probably want/have your favorite albums in my library. Also, I could have 10 albums from the same artist in my library, but only have 3 favorite albums. The one improvement I could see is to allow me to favorite an album which automagically adds it to my library.

TBH, I never use the qobuz app itself, so I have no experience trying to see how long it takes for roon and qobuz to get in sync (which sounds like your major problem). I use roon at home and use moode to access qobuz at the office. Although I assume moode is pulling favorites from the qobuz site when I'm at the office, but there is a long enough delay from me favoriting something at home before I ever use moode at the office, so any wait for something to show up isn't an issue for me.

FWIW, like you I never browse by album while inside my library. I browse genre, which then gives me artists, which then goes to the albums. If I'm outside my library, I browse genre, then it goes to albums, and I can discover what new jazz/classical/rock/etc albums may be out there that I've never heard before. If I like one, then I drill down to more by that artist.

I guess the key takeaway is that there probably isn't anyway to get something that works for absolutely everyone's preferences...

 

In the preceding discussion, when you say "add an album" all that is required is to add at least one track by that artist, right?

Adding a whole album seems overkill.

P.S. I suppose one could create an empty mp3/flac and add all the "missing" artists to that all in one go.

P.P.S. If I were to delete all the albums containing an artist, the preceding suggests that artist would disappear from my roon library?

 

I think one track is enough.
Re PS: no, because that fake track would not be identified by Roon, so none of the artists in its metadata would be added. Roon uses an object-oriented database, and all of its contents must come in metadata for identified albums/tracks.
Re PPS: Never tried. It depends on whether the Roon library is "garbage collected": if an object has no references in the library, it gets also removed.

 

I believe a single track works... but album vs track is still really a single entry and probably only makes a difference if you usually browse by track or browse by album (I never browse my library by track)

 

Nothing stands out on Apple Silicon to me.

 

Over the last week I been replaying around with Roon and also redid a Qobuz sub. Right off the bat Qobuz sounded better than Apple Music in the car and via the app, so I guess I'll go back to Qobuz even if it has lesser stuff to listen to.

Roon on Mac Mini M1 16 GB RAM so far is acting better than before, but honestly I question the crazy amount of RAM it is using right now.



Currently using it casually but also using it as Roon ARC home base. After a little while Roon ARC works great when I am outside. I don't care about streaming perfect 1:1, but there's some albums I want to listen to in my car that isn't on Qobuz but it is on my SSD.

Roon of course being a metadata whore helps me discover stuff in the Digital world. No other app comes close to that part. I guess RAAT on Roon makes thing a little warmer but I dunno, it is making sense for me to discover my library and using Roon metadata searches helps a lot.

I guess I'll sub Qobuz and Roon again full time month to month for now until I know I'm keeping both of them long term.

I used to use a PI and a HDD to access my music in the network. With how much little power and noise the M1 Mac Mini makes, my Mac HUD add on that I got from Amazon (goes on the bottom of the M1 Mac Mini) has two SDD slots (one 2.5 in and another M2). I just moved my digital files onto there and just leave the M1 on full time with no drama.

 

Wow..18Gb? I have a cheap NUC running Roon Core on ROCK OS and just the app on MBP with core out takes around 750Mb on my machine. If you plan to use Roon long term then May be a cheap NUC connected to router is good way to go.

 

There's a long-standing memory leak mystery in Roon. It seems to happen to a small number of Roon servers, any operating system. I've had it happen in one of my Roon servers, but not to the other two. All of them on Ubuntu Server 22.04.3, same music files on all of them, through mirroring. IOW, it's not Mac vs ROCK. Some ROCK users report the problem too.

 

How did you solve the problem? What would the symptom of memory leak? Stuttering or something like that?

 

Can’t quite remember how I noticed, it was a while ago, but it kind of went away after a reboot. Recently I noticed some memory creep on the same server, but nothing extreme. The other two are fine.

 

Like it is working just fine for a few days then boom that memory leak. Currently at 2.86 GB.

 

It's complicated... My 3 different servers. Servers e and t are on exactly the same hardware (i7-13700, 32GB RAM, 500GB system SSD, 4TB music SSD), server n on earlier hardware (i7-10510U, 16GB RAM, 4TB system+music SSD). All Ubuntu Server 22.04.3 (edited, the original image had server e twice).

 

I’ve been running Roon on a Mac Mini for a few years and upgraded to a M1 base spec version (8Gb RAM, 256 SSD) shortly after it was available. With the M1, I had frequent issues with memory leaks and had to restart Roon services every few weeks. It was using 6+Gb of the available 8Gb. But early last year there was an upgrade to native Apple silicon and I haven’t had an issue since. Roon consistently stays around 2Gb and I don’t have to restart services or reboot anymore. For me, Roon has been great and it’s the easiest way to get high quality audio to all my endpoints.

 

Quick Roon question that I can't figure out or find an answer to.

I have both Qobuz and Tidal subscriptions. I've divided up my music and Qobuz is for more calm music which I need a lot of the time, chilled jazz, ambient, solo acoustic guitar etc. and Tidal is for free jazz, rock, metal, folk, folk rock, etc.

So I've got both Tidal and Qobuz in Roon now, but I'd like to be able to add an album to one library or the other. I'd really like to have 2 profiles, one that has Tidal and one that has Qobuz. Because I think of them as separate libraries of music that I turn to at different times.

So I want to use Roon to discover music, but in Roon radio there is just one "add to library" button and I can't choose if it's Tidal or Qobuz it adds it to. I also can't seem to tell Roon to only play music that is available on Qobuz or only available on Tidal.

I created a second profile, but both Tidal and Qobuz are loaded in both profiles. I don't know what the point of the profiles are.

Any advice? I'm more and more just being told to f**k off by Roon I think we don't seem to think the same way about music

 

This might not completely solve this for you, but when you add an album to your library, then click on the album and then Versions, you can make either local or Tidal or Qobuz the Primary after adding each version to your library. As far as filtering albums based on the source, either local or Tidal or Qobuz: go to Home, then select Albums, then select Focus over on the upper left side. Keep arrow-buttoning over to the right and you'll see Storage Locations focus, then select either your local server or Tidal or Qobuz.

I know this doesn't solve the Roon Radio thing to only play music available from a certain service, but at least you can filter on the source once you've added it to your library.

 

Thanks @yotacowboy the versions works with Roon Radio. But leads me to another question. it gives me options to pick which version I want, the high res version or the CD quality version. My current Yggdrasil only does 44/16 but who knows what DAC I might get in the future. I know nothing about. upsampling or whatever, is it a problem to be playing the higher resolution version to the Yggdrasil?

interesting that in the Qobuz app they don't have options for different resolutions for each album. So maybe it's only relevant or playback on Roon and when playing from BubbleUpNP from Qobuz it doesn't matter?

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I'm also have trouble with Roon not being able to play. It's happened 3 times now in the past 2 days. I seem to have to restart to fix it. I can't figure out any trigger, one time it just wouldn't play anything, the play button did nothing. Restarted and it worked fine. Another time it happened when I switched to a different Pi2AES in airplay. which is very weird I don't know why that would affect Roon but restarting is a. pita to do all the time.

Maybe a question for the Roon forums if no one else. has had this problem? I'm running a MacBook Air M1 2020 with latest OS.

I found a bunch of new jazz albums using Roon Radio this evening! Very cool. it's not as good as I wish artist radio stations were, but it seems better than the artist radio stations on every music streaming service, which often have no clue and the stuff they. play is nothing like the artist you. started the station for. Roon seems to have more of a clue, but I'm waiting for AI! That's going to be awesome. until the world implodes.

 

I believe Yggdrasil, regardless of the versions all take up to 96/24 via Toslink and 192/24 with any other inputs (USB, AES, BNC etc) so not a problem if it's fed with >44/16 content. I have been doing that since getting my Yggdrasil in 2016.

But there is definitely a difference if one opts to play the 44/16 version vs the high-res version, in most cases the 44/16 versions are a tiny less detailed but makes up with a noticeable energetic drive.

And for Roon not playing, is your Pi2AES loaded with just airplay capable software? I use Ropieee as an endpoint with P4B+Pi2AES, it had been very stable. (though with AES one needs to configure the sync delay around 1500 ms)